Inga Sempé
Vapeur
Paris-based Sempé has a fascination with pleating. She sees it as a simple way to transform a material that is light and often otherwise too supple into something more solid, rigid and articulated. Her technique is on show in a storage system called Amoire Supple and a series of new lamps for Moustache, a new French furnishings company that has chosen this year’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile for its debut.
The examples shown here (grand and petit Vapeur for the table or sideboard and suspension Vapeur, which hangs from the ceiling) are made of pleated Tyvek, a paper usually used for envelopes and other packaging materials. Sempé says the material was ideally suited to this project, as it gives off a wonderful light “like a cloud” thanks to its characteristic small fibres.
Moustache founders Stéphane Arriubergé and Massimiliano Iorio say they hope to open “new domestic horizons” with their launch collection. Designers invited to “cohabit” with them include Françoise Azambourg, Big Game, Matai Crasset, Ana Mir and Emili Padros and Sempé, who also inspired the name and designed the logo.
She has used seaming and a special process similar to hat-making to give the shades their unique shape. (Her first job at 18 was working for a milliner in Saint-Germain, where she learnt to shape hats on wooden moulds.) The shade sits in a white, powder-coated steel base and offers self assembly with a bit of fun. Simply attach the Tyvek, which comes in a tube, to the base and then punch it “like a boxer” a few times to get the desired shape.
Johanna Grawunder
XX console
This console, made of tempered and laminated glass (with tiny chrome reinforcements at the base) is a marvel of engineering. Grawunder, who trained as an architect and worked at Sottsass Associati before opening her own San Francisco- and Milan-based practice in 2001, is full of respect for Glas, a unique manufacturer of mirrors and glass furniture based in Brianza, Italy. She describes it as “a family-run operation that you will only find in Italy”.
She presented company officials with some drawings – “these abstract architectural kind of things” – not really knowing if it was possible to produce the work but they loved her concepts and so found a way.
Since most products in Glas Italia’s catalogue are clear, these colours are quite special. They are achieved through a special technique, where a kind of resin is sandwiched within two 8mm sheets of glass. Grawduner chose two complimentary colours so that “it almost looks like you are seeing something in shadow”; you don’t really know if it’s two colours or one. She works a lot in light and colour and, although she tries to get away from it sometimes, she acknowledges it’s almost “like a destiny”.
She has also designed lighting for Flos and Murano-blown glass for Salviati, as well as taking on special commissions. She is completing a residential building in Hong Kong and creating a lighting installation with Flos that will cover the entire ceiling of the new restaurant under construction on the top floor of the new Museum of Art and Design in New York.
Studio Job
The Gospel according to Job
Job Smeets and Nynke Tynagel of Studio Job are spreading their gospel of “art, design, mastery and abstraction” in the cloisters of San Simpliciano, a former Benedictine monastery, in Milan during this year’s Salone. The Dutch duo’s work sits somewhere between object and objet d’art, “neither purely commodity nor purely art”, according to design curator Murray Moss.
Gospel is comprised of several elements: The Birth & The Crucifixion, two large sculptures in stained glass framed in rosewood; The Last Supper, a giant dinner service of 17 rusty pieces cast out of 2,000kg of foundry iron; and The Last Supper service, a 12-piece dinner set with Bavarian-style shapes, hand decorated in polychromatic faience (tin glaze) and finished in 24-carat gold lustre by Royal Tichelaar Makkum.
Makkum, one of the Netherlands’ oldest potteries, developed about 150 new colours for the project and each of the pieces comes decorated with its own, tailor-made story. “Religions started all the propaganda,” Smeets says, and so the scenes are comic and a little ironic – “a metaphor for the beginning and the end, a doomed landscape, a kind of abstraction of the truth”. There are bombs, bullets, four-leaf clovers, saints, Noah’s ark and, on the Hallelujah pot, Jesus with the sprout between his spread legs like a giant phallus.
The collection is being presented by the Zuiderzee Museum from Enkhuizen, north Netherlands.
www.studiojob.nl,
www.zuiderzeemuseum.nl
Konstantin Grcic
Monza
Industrial designer Grcic describes his new chair for Plank as “really a very straightforward chair”. Although it’s based on an existing horseshoe typology that you can find in Scandinavia from designers such as Hans Wegner, what makes Monza different (and more Grcic) is the injection-moulded back in colourful polypropylene plastic.
The chair comes in natural or black-stained ash, with a choice of six hues for the plastic, including black, white, green, blue and two reds. Grcic refers to the coloured part as the “significant element”, adding visual interest as well as holding the legs and seat in place. Still, he will always think of Monza as a simple wooden chair. Its traditional seat-box construction is definitely “not high-tech” – a far cry from the complex Myto chair that he and Plank presented at last year’s Salone after working with plastics manufacturer Basf on an entirely new polymer and from the successful Miura stool, which is full of complex geometry.
Grcic says this was intentional. He wanted to return to the roots of Plank, a family-run business established in 1893 and based in Bolzano, the German-speaking Sud Tirol part of Italy. Before transforming itself into a design-driven brand with sophisticated automated systems, the company was one of the biggest producers of old-fashioned, rustic wooden Tyrol-style chairs, supplying ski resorts and beer halls throughout Austria, south Germany and north Italy.
Grcic will also show a new office stool for Magis and a bamboo chair for new start-up Skitsch.
Naoto Fukasawa
Grande Papilio
Grande Papilio is a new swivelling lounge chair with an optional ottoman. According to Fukasawa, the shape is like a sculpture cut from a solid conical-shaped chunk expanding upwards. And, indeed, it has beautifully executed and highly controlled curves. That’s not surprising, since Fukusawa is known to be precise to the fraction of a millimetre. Giorgio Busnelli at B&B Italia, which has worked with the Japanese designer since 2005 on pieces such as the critically acclaimed “floating” sofa Cloud and Shelf X bookcase, describes his work as minimal and exact in both shapes and details. This new chair is typical.
Although wingback chairs date back to Queen Anne, this one began with Fukusawa’s observations about how people actually use chairs, not stylistic or historical references. He found that rather than always sitting rigidly straight, people generally end up twisting to either the left or right (presumably when relaxing, talking, reading or snoozing). So he has spread the back of the chair around to curved sides.
The piece takes its name from the spreading wings of a butterfly. (Papilio is butterfly in Italian.) Yet it is also practical: an exposed zip up the back means that the leather or fabric cover is removable.
One of his country’s most important and well-known industrial designers, Fukusawa will also be showing the Dome, Bucket and Sphere lamps with environmentally friendly light sources from Panasonic and his Hiroshima series for Japan’s Maruni.
BarberOsgerby
Lanterne Marine
This overscale art-glass vase for Venetian manufacturer Venini is by London-based duo Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby, a pair gaining momentum in the design world. The piece’s unusual form owes something to Venini’s home on the island of Murano and, in particular, to frequent boat trips the designers took there to work on previous projects. During these crossings, they noticed that metal frames and cages were used in many different types of nautical objects, to protect hanging lamps and in the construction of buoys, for example. They had already wanted to make something with interlocking pieces, to create new colours through layering. And so they conceived of a crinoline-type frame that keeps everything together.
Two pieces of hand-blown glass are held in place by an anthracite-anodized, laser-cut aluminium cage. The base comes in transparent talpa-coloured glass, one of Venini’s signature shades
. The designers describe the open top, shown here in opaline black, as a stamen-like protuberance, the idea being that you fill it with water and flower stems.
Venini was established in 1921 and its master craftsmen have blown for some of the greats, including Carlo Scarpa, Giò Ponti, Tappio Wirkkala, Timo Sarpaneva and Ettore Sottsass. Its recent output has been a bit dry, with the notable exception of Pierre Charpin work in 2003 and 2004, so this new partnership is welcome. The vase pictured here is one of three; each comes in two different colourways and is limited to an edition of five.
Sam Hecht
TBC
TBC stands for Table, Bench, Chair and Hecht, co-founder of London-based design office Industrial Facility, sees it as a piece of furniture that is “kind of in-between”. In a way, it’s that chair we all have in our bedrooms, which gets used for stacking books, draping clothes or propping open a door but never for sitting on. Hecht said he was thinking pluralistically – creating something that can travel through life with you, doing odd jobs, rather than having only one use. “It can change as you change,” he explains.
For Hecht and his partner Kim Colin, who set up their practice in 2002, function always comes first; aesthetics are never a starting point (though the finished products always look good). They are interested in “getting under the surface” and creating products that connect with their location. Their best-known work includes appliances and electronics for Epsom, Magis, Lexon and Whirlpool, as well as products for Japanese brand Muji, for which they are European creative directors. They are also creative advisers to Herman Miller in the US and design for London-based Established and Sons, which already produces their Two Timer clock and Beam light.
TBC is made of European oak and stained beech and comes in three versions: a single chair with the bench part wider on one side (enough for a coffee cup or book), another configured like a love seat (with chairs back to back) and the version shown here. A small scoop in the oak shows you where to sit.
Shigeru Ban
Scale 1/30
It’s a rare thing, Shigeru Ban designing tableware. The architect, born in Japan and trained in the US, is best known for his sustainable buildings and humanitarian work. His functional, low-cost refugee shelters, created with recycled cardboard tubing, easily built, dismantled, moved and reused, have been used to house victims of natural and man-made disasters all over the world .
Ban does commercial work too. His designs for super-luxurious beach villas at Dellis Cay, an exclusive private island in Turks and Caicos, were unveiled just last month. He is also showing a 10-unit modular furniture system made from an environmentally innovative wood-plastic composite with Finland’s Artek at this year’s Salone. But when Beatrice Delafontaine of When Objects Work, the Brussels-based producer-cum-curator of everyday, architect-designed objects for the home, first approached him, Ban initially said no.
Eventually, of course, Delafontaine persuaded him to reconsider and the result is this dish. Ban says he looked upon the project as “designing a small architecture”. The dish’s structure actually relates to the Pompidou Centre that Ban is completing in Metz, France. It is produced in “multiplex” birch, rather than solid timber, so the wood has to be bent in different directions, with and against the grain. Delafontaine says development was a difficult process but she shared Ban’s enthusiasm for making the impossible possible.
Fernando and Humberto Campana
Woodfloor Lamp
This lamp has a very simple construction process. Slim strips of pine are drilled with holes and then attached to series of metal rings; the rings, which run from the base up to the shade, also contain the light fittings. That its designers are the Brazilian Campana brothers, whose goal is to “triumph with simple solutions”, creating the precious out of the day-to-day, should come as no surprise.
The São Paulo-based duo describe this as a reading lamp with a scenic approach. It gives off an interesting type of light, with geometric beams projected on to the floor, wall and ceiling, giving “the impression of a forest”, something like sun peaking through trees. The idea was originally developed for Humberto, who needed a lamp at home, and it now forms part of the debut collection for Skitsch, a new high-end design company also showing for the first time this week.
The Campanas are among 28 international designers responsible for an eclectic group of 50 products – furniture and accessories for both indoor and out – prepared for the launch. The brainchild of Renato Preti, an entrepreneur with a CV that includes B&B Italia, Moooi and outdoor specialists Unopiù, the company is perhaps the most ambitious making its debut in Milan. It plans to sell through its own stores, catalogues and website. The impressive list of designers on board includes Todd Bracher, Maarten Baas, Konstantin Grcic, Philippe Nigro, Xavier Lust and Front Design.
Vicenzo di Cotiis
DC 290
Although decidedly under the radar, di Cotiis is in my opinion one of the most interesting architect-cum-designers working in Italy today. He has just two outlets for furniture design: the Pisa-based Cecotti Collection and his own, Progetto Domestico, sold through his gallery in Milan’s Via San Raffaele. He spends the rest of his time on architecture and interiors projects for private clients in Italy, as well hotels and shops both abroad and at home.
For his own production pieces, which tend to be limited runs, he works with recycled and reclaimed materials, often deconstructing and reconstructing existing pieces. But for Ceccotti the work is always new. This year he has concentrated on wood, Ceccotti’s speciality. This seating comes as a 2.8-metre long sofa or as an armchair and is based around the cross of an X. De Cotiis says this is both graphic and symbolic; the X was important in furniture from the 1920s to the 1950s, a period that interests him and is usually the starting point for his recycling.
The frames are made in waxed, ebony-coloured American walnut finished with burnished brass feet and the seats are scooped out beneath the anthracite grey, aniline calf leather cushions. The pieces are about two things. There is the cross that curves gently into the frames cradling the upholstery and then there is the comfort – the deep low seats with cushions of natural latex and goose feathers. Sartorial details include saddlery stitching on the seat of the chair and hand-stitching in kangaroo twine in place of traditional buttoning.
Nick Vinson is special projects director at Wallpaper* magazine
