Hasta La Ideas

Vienna Design Week: Eindhoven design duo Daphna Laurens collaborated with Austrian furniture company Wittmann to make this duck-like stool and a chair with a bulging backrest.

Stool 01 has a triangular base made from two loops of tubular steel under an oak top, which extends to one side to create a small side table. Chair 01 is made from a tubular steel frame and upholstered with a leather seat and back.

“Our approach is playful,” the designers told Dezeen. “We start with cutting out paper in all kinds of forms. After this we make compositions like abstract art. Then we choose our favourite compositions and start to fantasise and make interpretations – what could it be? This is where we start sketching from 2D abstract forms to a product.”

The pieces were shown at the pop-up exhibition restaurant Eat Drink Design as part of the Passionswege programme during Vienna Design Week.

Daphna Isaacs Burggraaf and Laurens Manders formed Daphna Laurens after meeting as students at the Design Academy Eindhoven.

Other projects at Vienna Design Week we’ve featured include lampshades made from seaweed and printers that use felt pens instead of ink – see all our stories from Vienna Design Week.

Other projects by Daphna Laurens we’ve posted on Dezeen include a lamp that looks like it’s peeking through a wall and a set of cork and aluminium containers.

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Here’s some more information from the designers:

Daphna Laurens at the Wittmann Möbelwerkstätten
As a part of the Passionswege project Daphna Laurens worked with Wittmann. Passionswege is a major focal point of Vienna Design Week. The programme invites young, emerging designers to work with selected Vienna-based firms and manufacturers, exchanging design ideas and producing a tangible outcome, be it a product or installation.

Originally a saddlery, the Wittmann Company with its headquarters in Etsdorf, not far from Vienna, has grown in a hundred years to become the upholstery furniture specialist that it now is ‐ and which has also retained its expertise in the field of leather processing. Precision, exactness and skill in handcraft are the qualities that distinguish the producers and the ‘genuine Wittmann’ products.

Daphna Laurens chose an explorative and intuitive approach for their collaboration with Wittmann. Instead of taking a product representative of the producer as their starting point, the designers gathered colour and mood images in the inner world of the production site and translated these into what was at first an abstract repertoire of forms (bed or sofa? side table? Or none of these?)

Out of puzzle of variation options and ways of seeing things ­‐ and in a communication process between producer and designer -­ the eventually pieced it together and produced two furniture designs of striking character and with strong personality.

The post Chair 01 and Stool 01 by Daphna Laurens
with Wittmann appeared first on Dezeen.

Dutch studio Daphna Laurens‘s latest collection of furniture includes this floor lamp that leans against the wall as if it is peaking through to the other side.

The series is based on circular geometry and the designers developed each piece as a two-dimensional drawing.

The cone-shaped shade of this wall lamp is mounted on a semicircular plate and can be rolled away from its integrated shelf.

Two of the legs on this coffee table are replaced by a hollow cone that can be used for storage and a series of small wooden objects have round mirrors inlaid in their smooth surfaces.

The collection was designed exclusively for an exhibition at Galerie Gosserez in Paris, which starts on 24 November and continues until 14 January.

Other projects we’ve published by Daphna Laurens include a series of lamps called Tafelstukken and a Vault for stashing possessions.

Heres a little more information from the designers:

Collection “Cirkel”

The new pieces designed by Daphna Laurens presented in the collection “Cirkel” have a shared basis, the circle. Two dimensional drawings and ideas took shape during the last months in their workshop by modifying this elemental shape. Composing, cutting and twisting the surface, adding or removing lines, applying materials and colour resulted in the design of the new coffee table and wall lights. At the same time a more philosophical approach is the foundation for the mirrors: Elephant, Owl and Mole. Luigi Pirandello (1904): “Fantasy embellishes the product by encircling it and, as it were, illuminating it from within with those precious images of which it reminds us or to which we feel an instinctive connection.” Leaning lamp against the wall is the floor lamp. This piece leaves no other choice then to put it against the wall. It is a little creature what is looking through your wall to the other side.

Inspiration

The inspiration was basic, basic forms and lines. Bauhaus is of course one of their inspiration sources and especially Laszlo Moholy Nagy was a big inspiration for the wall lights. They wanted to create a lamp that during daytime is an art piece more than a wall light and at night it is a wall light. With this language of form they feel very comfortable. With their designs they try not to tell what the function is, first comes form and the function is second and it may never come. Nevertheless they have a function in mind if they design an object or a product, but they do not want to make the function to visible. For them design is about form not about function.

Daphna Laurens

With their colourful way of working Daphna and Laurens transform everyday objects into characteristic ‘products’. They research tradition, material, composition and translate it into colourful contemporary forms. Shaping by hand and intuitively making design choices give their work an authentic appearance. ”Being in close contact with the subjects as well as the materials in the workshop makes designing a real joy.”