powell bowl

new works (gridlock 2)
NextLevel Galerie, Paris, on show until January 14th 2012

foreword by Will Wiles, deputy editor of Icon Magazine.

Brutalism’s name is a gift to its detractors. It conjures architecture that is somehow brutish: buildings that are aggressive and inhumane. The stark, primal forms of brutalist architecture and its rough, unadorned surfaces don’t immediately help dispel this impression. But brutalism is possibly the most sensual architectural style there is – or at least the most tactile, the most attuned to touch and feeling. Its raw, exposed concrete surfaces – the béton brut that first gave the style its name – invite touch. Your touch is rewarded with a surprising variety of textures from a that is so often derided as sombre and monotone. Poured, it can be as smooth, dense and cool as marble. Or it can take on the surface qualities of whatever formwork is used to shape it. I remember first seeing the wood grain on the shuttered concrete of the National Theatre in London – my first instinct was to run my fingertips across it.

This same invitation to touch applies to the concrete surfaces that are the new addition to Philippe Malouin's Gridlock range of furniture. Concrete has been used for furniture before, most famously Ron Arad’s Concrete Stereo. But Arad’s stereo was post-modern, post-industrial kitsch, exaggerating its own weight, cracking under it to reveal the rusting rebar underneath. Gridlock revels in its modernism, and with the glittering lattices that are the material heart of the range, the concrete is rendered almost weightless.

It's still the brassy grid that takes the eye, of course – in the light scattering through the structure of the Svetko chandelier, an inverted pyramid like Stefan Svetko's office for Slovak radio in Bratislava, and in the intriguing moire patterns that gather in the depths of the supports of the Scapa desk. But what the addition of the concrete slabs brings is this touch, a tactility that the materially sparing grid itself never quite had.

The way the grids express large architectural volumes with minimal matter makes it clear why they appealed so much to the utopian designers of the 20th century – architects and engineers such as Buckminster Fuller, Cedric Price and Yona Friedman. With space frames and geodesic domes, these designers took the modular, repeatable nature of metal framed structures and extended them outwards to their logical conclusion, proposing vast, city-enclosing megastructures. The addition of the concrete surfaces also makes the range's debt to the architecture of the 1960s and 1970s more obvious. It's an entirely conscious aesthetic strategy – and it's partly autobiographical. Malouin was born in Montreal, Canada, but lives and works in London. Both cities have particularly fine collections of modernist and brutalist architecture, and it's this shared heritage that Malouin wanted to emphasise. As preparation for the new Gridlock series, Malouin toured London's brutalist highlights with studio colleague Will Yates, lingering particularly at the Barbican Centre and the Golden Lane Estate, the closest the city has to a fully developed megastructure. the curved lip of the Barbican balconies can be seen at the edge of the Powell shelves, which take their name from one of the centre's architects, Geoffrey Powell of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon.

But while Gridlock feels industrial – in its straightforward, platonic forms and the repetitive efficiency of the grid – it is in fact assembled entirely by hand. Malouin's tribute to the industry-inspired, labour-saving dreams of modernism is paid for in toil. This paradox appeals to the designer – he likes things that are handmade that don't look handmade, such as geometric Yachiyo rug in chainmail. Malouin's practice is based on experimentation – he doesn't use a material that he hasn't got to grips with directly and played with, or tested to destruction, to explore its properties. His projects emerge from these explorations. They have a thoroughness and care built into them at the lowest level, while still expressing the automated, machined dreams of the modernist flowering.

Will Wiles is deputy editor of Icon magazine. Care of Wooden Floors, his novel about a man driven insane by minimalist interior decoration, will e published by HarperPress in February 2012.

luder shelves

scarpa desk

svetko lamp

svetko lamp detail

delorean wall light


time elapsed
installation for J. & L. Lobmeyr, Vienna October 2011, commission by Vienna Passionswege, Vienna Design Week. September 2011

Time is a quality that makes Lobmeyr so special.

Not only do their glass objects posses timeless designs, independent of changing fashions, but the calibre of the crystal itself means they stand the test of time. Great investments of time are taken in producing and decorating the crystalware, up to 100 hours for a single object, and this investment differentiates Lobmeyr from other glass manufacturers. We have used the theme of time here to illustrate how unique Lobmeyr is.

The flow of sand through an hourglass is traditionally used to keep track of elapsed time. It is also physical representation of the fine line between the past and the future. Through the machine in this room, the deposition of sand forms not minutes and hours on a clock face but abstract and changing patterns, illustrating the link between time and decoration. The sand also holds a physical connection with Lobmeyr, since it is the raw material from which the crystal is created.

The hourglasses in this room were made by introducing a new element to two existing glasses from Lobmeyr's Alpha series. A turned wooden connector transforms the vessels into very different functional objects. Here the flow of sand expresses how much time it has taken to engrave a decoration. At the one minute mark, the decoration illustrated on the side of the hourglass is simple, at the five minute mark it becomes more intricate, and so on.

time elapsed main installation

time elapsed, spirograph pattern

time elapsed detail

hourglasses

hourglasses for time elapsed installation, using Lobmeyr's Alpha series glasses.


1:4 project for vera chapter one, by KM & EM, www.verachapterone.com, London, September 2011

The 1:4 bowls were one of eleven products produced by different designers in response to photographs of a fictional character named Vera. We had to respond to this brief by telling the story of Vera's life through an object by selecting one of the provided photographs as inspiration. Here is our story:

At the start of Vera’s impressionable teenage years, her mother instilled a strict parental framework. Worrying of the tainting effect of peers on precious Vera, her mother sent Vera to boarding school. This allowed the young girl to live within a walled garden.

The ‘1:4’ bowls embody a stiff upbringing with geometric forms and crisp edges, and a modularity of just three figures. The figures can be seen as controlled versions of Vera’s mother’s personality: slightly different, all rigid.

The production of the concrete pieces has been precisely measured; reminiscent of the process of cake baking that Vera’s mother would do – always following the recipe to the letter. Using exact quantities of pigment, the bowls are presented in a trio of pastel shades from the same era.

Small bowl – Waxed concrete, pink, 150mm x 150mm
Square bowl – Waxed concrete, green, 220mm x 220mm
Long bowl – Waxed concrete, blue, 360mm x150mm



waxed concrete fruit bowls or "vide-poche"

waxed concrete fruit bowls or "vide-poche"


yachiyo metal
rug commisioned by the carwan gallery, beirut. presented during the Cubique fair, Berlin, October 2011

This year I have been doing quite a lot of research on, and work using, metal. The Yachiyo metal rug is a result of this research. It is a piece designed to last many lifetimes, it is virtually indestructible and it involves thousands of hand-manufacturing hours, since it is impossible to make by machine.

The Yachiyo metal rug is made using a very intricate form of chain mail. Having investigated various types of chain mail, ranging from traditional/ medieval manufacturing techniques to more con- temporary, machine-made chain mail patterns, we chose to draw from the Japanese ‘12-in-2’ chain mail method. Not only did we find this type of chain mail to be virtually indestructible, but it also created a very stable membrane, structural yet flexible; not dissimilar to a tight hand-tufted rug.

Having explored ideas for a range of furniture made using this technique, we chose to create a rug because the attention is focused solely on the 2-D object itself, the craftsmanship can be better admired this way.

The metal rug is completely handmade from galvanized steel wire, the same type of wire that is used to make animal pen fencing in farms. The looped wire is taken and, using a metal rod connected to a power drill in a timber frame jig, wound into a tight coil. This coil is then removed from the metal rod and hand cut into small rings. These are riveted together one-by-one in the Japanese ‘12-in-2’ pattern, which consists of 2 central rings with 12 perpendicular rings connected around. This process is painstakingly repeated to create the rug.

The final piece presents an isometric rectangular prism which we created, through playing with ide- as of perspective, so that a two dimensional object like a rug could visually spring into the 3D realm. Each of the three colors within the rug is a metal- lic coating, which is industrially electroplated onto the three distinct parts before they are assembled together by connecting rings one-by-one.

One of my amazing interns Yachiyo Kawana has worked on this project from the beginning, which is why the piece is named after her. It is also very fitting, as, like the chain mail method, Yachiyo is Japanese.

The entire rug was handmade in London by Yachiyo Kawana, Greg Austin, Carlo Cialli, Anna Perugini, Vic Margevich, Maria Kuzmenko, Midea Diomideia Kolani, Xue Dong, Khadija Durbar, Jade Blair, Zahra Rajaei, and it required more than 3000 meters of galvanized wire and 3000 hours of work to make it.

yachiyo rug



yachiyo rug detail