Mathieu Lehanneur on Being Unpredictable, Working in Five-Minute Bursts, and Why His Eyelids Are His Most Important Tool
Posted in: Core77 Questionnaire
This is the latest installment of our Core77 Questionnaire. Previously, we talked to Misha Kahn.
Name: Mathieu Lehanneur
Occupation: Designer
Location: Paris
Current projects: I just launched a radio for Lexon named Hybrid, and I’m working on new meeting spaces for Pullman Hotels. I recently won a competition for the interior design of the Grand Palais in Paris; that will be a project of maybe ten years in the works. I’m also working on new spaces for the luxury watch brand Audemars Piguet during Miami Art Basel. And I’m working on a project that will be launched next July in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It will be a place named Le Laboratoire that includes a cafe, a restaurant, a store, an auditorium and an art gallery. It will be just between Harvard University and MIT.
Mission: To be as close as I can to the human beings I work for, and not to consider them as “targets” or “consumers” or “clients” but as very complex machines—as human beings are—and try to find the best way to serve them.
Above and top right image: Lehanneur’s Business Playground for Pullman Hotels. Portrait by Jean-Luc Luyssen / Madame Figaro
Wiser, a collection of devices that measure and manage household energy consumption
When did you decide that you wanted to be a designer? When I was probably 15 or 16. Basically, I wanted to be an artist, and my father was an engineer, so I decided to combine both visions.
Education: I went to design school in Paris, at École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle (ENSCI Les Ateliers). I was supposed to stay for five years but I ended up spending seven years there.
First design job: Actually, the day after I graduated, I decided to work without any boss, because it’s not easy to share vision. So my first job was as a freelancer for the Palais de la Découverte, a science museum in Paris. I was commissioned to design all of the interactive devices for explaining astrophysical phenomena to the public.
Who is your design hero? Probably Buckminster Fuller. He was a thinker, a scientist, an architect, an engineer—a designer, basically.
One of Lehanneur’s employees in the designer’s Paris studio
Post a Comment