World Design Spotlight: La Nave

In the nineteen-eighties, in a city like Valencia, the air was permeated by a great desire to make up for the time lost in the previous forty years. In graphic design, almost everything remained to be done and in the new civil society institutions, too. In these circumstances a creative group took shape which was called upon, although its members did not yet know it, to be a reference, both for the talent of the designers and for their innovative way of working. In an old industrial building (“nave” in Spanish) in Calle San Vicente, the group La Nave was born. 

This group of eleven (designers, architects and draughtsmen) contained the perfect mix of anarchy and rigor, fun and work, individuality and teamwork. They were their own bosses, with their somewhat unorthodox working hours, and they were fortunate enough to have a clientele that was willing to give a new twist to the communication of its institutions and companies, very receptive to the new proposals put forward by La Nave. They were young, as was everything: they and the country that was being reborn. 

The context in which La Nave arose, that is, the social, political and design conditions of that time, together with the creativity of the team members, were decisive aspects to understanding the influence they would later have and which, of course, none of them imagined at the time. 

The most suggestive crew of its time sailed between 1984 and 1991, barely seven years that served to lay the foundations for the design that would follow and from which, furthermore, several National Design Award winners would emerge. 

As Nacho Lavernia explained during a talk organized by professor Román de la Calle in 2015 (“Art and culture in the memory of the Valencian transition”), La Nave took shape little by little. “Caps i Mans, formed by Eduardo Albors, José Juan Belda, Luis Lavernia and Nacho Lavernia, and NBC, formed by Daniel Nebot, Paco Bascuñán and Quique Company, all met at around that time. The early eighties. It was a kind of love at first sight. We shared a common vision of design and, just as importantly or more so, we connected immediately at a personal level. What put us in contact was that we competed in a project, the signposting of the Devesa de El Saler, a tender that was won by NBC”. 

“Later, the Feria de Valencia, through its then director, José María del Rivero, gave us the opportunity to work together on the project to change its corporate identity and the signing of its facilities, together with Xavier Bordils, who left the team early and took care of the signing, whilst Caps i Mans and NBC designed the graphic image. We felt very comfortable working together and, in fact, we each partially collaborated on some of the projects of the other team. We were just as likely to be in one studio as the other and we openly shared everything we were doing.”

 “It was after returning from a trip to the Milan Fair when the idea of joining together occurred to us. The emerging Spanish state with its self-governing regions promised to be a generator of new projects and we thought then that having a large and capable team could be convenient, and even necessary, to tackle projects of a certain complexity, so that when we returned from Milan we set to work. There were 7 of us at the time, between NBC and Caps i Mans, and there ended up being 11 of us because we were joined by Marisa Gallén, Sandra Figuerola and Luis González, who had already collaborated with Caps i Mans. Then Carlos Bento, who worked as an architect in Madrid, came on board.”

“We found premises, an industrial building of more than 400 m2, that among other things gave the group its name and, by the end of summer 1984, we were already there. The idea was to dissolve the former groups and work individually with the aim of creating flexible working teams, able to adapt to the complexity and theme of each project. We then gave ourselves a legal personality that was new at the time, a ‘community of assets’, and we found a secretary, Luz Martí, who would provide some order to the chaos of invoices, receipts, suppliers, customers… And who had to be capable of doing so, moreover, for 11 different bosses without losing her way, which she was,” explained Lavernia.

Prior to the formation of La Nave, the nineteen-seventies were a creative rehearsal for what was to come, with the arrival of a new generation whose members, including some of those who would later form La Nave, behaved like true professional designers. In 1972 Caps i Mans was founded, with Eduardo Albors, José Juan Belda, Carlos Albert and Jorge Luna; in ’74, Nuc, with Lola Castelló, Vicent Martínez, Daniel Nebot and Luis Adelantado. Xavier Bordils was also a key player during this second half of the seventies, collaborating very actively with the recently created Industrial Design Department of the IPI, Industrial Promotion Institute of the Chamber of Commerce of Valencia, which organized the “Industrial Design Conferences”, arranged courses and workshops and created the publication “Diseño Comunicación”, from 1977 to 1983, which spoke, at last, about design. 

Enric Satué, in his book “El diseño gráfico en España”, referred to La Nave as “a team of young designers who would become justly famous riding the horse of galloping postmodernism of the eighties”. La Nave led the transition from one classical conception of design to another new one. This postmodern pulse, which broke the rules of the Modernist Movement, offering total creative freedom, predominated in its work and represented a new way of understanding the profession. 

The designs produced by the group for public bodies (the Valencian Government, SGAE, IMPIVA, INE, FGV, Botanical Garden …) and for private companies (Gandía Blasco, TOI, ACTV, Aumar, Industrias Saludes, Lamsar…) not only enjoyed great relevance among professionals of that time, but have maintained this relevance during all these years, which ratifies good work, over and above fashions and trends. La Nave marked the beginning of Valencian design, which became a profession, and formed the nucleus of the Association of Designers of the Valencian Community (ADCV).

The work of La Nave has been the subject of various exhibitions and anthologies and, in 2008, the association for the Fostering of Art and Design (FAD) of Barcelona, the first centre of reference for design and architecture of Spain, dedicated a tribute to them and granted them the title of “Masters” and the chain of the FAD, a recognition that is very highly valued by the navieros. 

In issue 5 of the mythical magazine Ardi, which dedicated an extensive dossier to La Nave, the designers Juli Capella and Quim Larrea captured the spirit of the group well: “They gave the irritating sensation that they had fun working. And we envied them… We were seduced by their singular organization, like the mystery of the trinity but with 11 members. It was like reliving the abandoned utopia of the group and without sacrifices. It was a breath of fresh air.”

“In reality we would all have liked to swarm aboard, to join its crew and sail all kinds of seas. Because it gave the impression that fun and labour were one and the same. Because we had always dreamed of the utopia of travelling in company but going solo at the same time.” 

(Photographs taken from the documentary “Cuarto creciente. 25 años de diseño en la Comunidad Valenciana”, directed by Menta for the ADCV; from the documentary “Metrópolis”, of TVE, broadcast in 1987; and from the meeting held at the Escuela de Arte y Superior de Diseño de Alicante in 2017).