Hasta La Ideas

Lei ci mette la lampadina, tu tutto il resto.

Swedish designers Glimpt worked with Peruvian artisans to produce the hand-carved wooden bases for these coffee tables (+ slideshow).

Mattias Rask and Tor Palm of Glimpt travelled to the village of Yungay in Peru to research the techniques used by woodworkers at a workshop run by voluntary organisation, Artesanos Don Bosco.

They designed a range of contemporary tables that make use of the facilities provided to artisans, who are taught furniture-making skills to encourage them to stay and work locally, rather than moving to the cities.

The bases are made from local timber, including a hard white wood called Lengha, and a type of cedar. The wood is turned on a lathe before the faceted decoration is chiselled by hand and painted.

Explaining how the project came about, Rask told Dezeen: “We sent an email to a Swedish guy in Lima and asked him about crafts organisations in Peru; he basically said that Artesanos Don Bosco are the best artisans in Peru, so we sent them an email!”

Prehistoric Aliens will continue to be produced in Yungay and was presented by Italian furniture brand Cappellini as part of its Cappellini NEXT collection in Milan earlier this year.

Glimpt collaborates with artisans around the world and previously created a range of stools made from seagrass in Vietnam, and ceramic lights painted to look like strawberries produced by craftsmen in South Africa.

See all design by Glimpt »
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Still life photography is by Daniel Thrue.

Here’s some more information from the designers:

Glimpt of Peru – Prehistoric Aliens

We spent the autumn of 2012 in Peru working and learning from the Crafts Cooperative, Artesanos Don Bosco, a continuation of our work with craftsmen and women from different countries.

Before our trip we had not fully appreciated how extensive this organisation was. Artesanos Don Bosco is part of a large Italian voluntary organisation called Operazione Mato Grosso. This organisation was founded in the 1960s by Father Hugo, a Catholic missionary priest who saw there was a need to help poor farmers in the Andes. Now, some fifty years later, Operazione Mato Grosso has roughly 2000 Italian volunteers and employs about twice as many Peruvians.

The work involves educating and training people in the remote villages in the Andes, and then creating employment opportunities for them there. The idea is to encourage people to stay and work in these isolated areas rather than move to a very uncertain future in Lima, something that many Peruvians otherwise are tempted to do.

Operazione Mato Grosso promotes the virtues of a simple, unhurried life, living and working in cooperation with one another. They have started schools, orphanages, hospitals and even power stations that provide electric power in the mountains. All this is free of charge for the poor.

One part of this organisation, called Artesanos Don Bosco, provides craftsmanship training. After five years training with ADB most of the artisans then work in the organisation’s cooperative. The courses they give are mainly related to different ways of working with wood. This includes furniture making, decorations, carving pictures and the construction of housing. They also teach stone masonry, how to make glass, different ways of working with textiles and even metal work.

We decided we wanted to help them develop a more modern series of furniture. After having visited several villages and different cooperatives in the Andes we finally settled on Yungay as the village where we would set to work. In Yungay there was a little cooperative that worked with furniture making. During our visits we were impressed by their very high standards of craftsmanship and above all by the skill of the people who carved pictures in wood.

So day after day of soup followed by fried guinea-pigs and washed down with Inca Cola finally lead to the production of a series of coffee tables called Prehistoric Aliens. Our main difficulty was not a shortage of good ideas but rather the language barrier. Neither of us spoke any Spanish but we were faced with a situation where this was the only possible language for communication.

The first few weeks we had been helped by our American friend Nick, but after a while we had to manage by ourselves. After keen language practice on the computer every evening, and getting a lot of hands on experience every day in the workshops, we finally managed to make some Spanish sounding words and were rewarded with the nicknames Gordo and Chato (Chubby and Shorty) by our fellow workers.

Marcial, Barosso, Aristares and Messias taught us alot and we hope we have taught them something as well. It has been a good experience living and working with them. Hopefully our collaboration will provide them with more work so that they can keep on developing their skills and supporting their families, as well as contributing to the great work of Artesanos Don Bosco and Operazione Mato Grosso.

The name, Prehistoric Aliens, was inspired by Peru’s fantastic cultural heritage which often seems very mystical and ancient to our western eyes.

The small coffee tables are almost like small spaceships that have just landed, with their leader, The Robot.

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by Glimpt appeared first on Dezeen.

French designer Matali Crasset is showing a series of mysterious hooded furniture at an exhibition in Paris (+ slideshow).

The group of furniture is entitled the Permanents and is designed to evoke the habits and rituals of an imaginary human community.

Folded sheets of felt create structures that envelop the body and form hoods overhead.

Each piece is given a unique purpose – as a place to lie down, sit or come together – and some incorporate objects including a chair and a wooden bell.

Orange mats or chair coverings inside the felt structures highlight functions and represent the warmth of the body, while the grey shell emphasises its protective quality.

The furniture is being shown at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac together with a film directed by Matali Crasset and Paris and Berlin-based artist Juli Susin, which shows people wearing coloured versions of the hoods performing a series of rituals on an imagined journey to a mystical mountain.

Crasset says: “I think of the exhibition as a space for introspection. I’m interested in presenting elements of a moving and developing line of thought by using formalizations far removed from my usual practice with the ‘exhibition’ object.”

“I question my own practice as much as I question design in all its entrenchments, by thinking of it as an autonomous activity, detached from any basic premise,” she adds. “Thinking, and suggesting hypotheses, is what excites me in this context.”

The exhibition continues until 20 July.

Matali Crasset designed a sofa system comprising two removable upholstered chairs and pebble-like cushions that was launched in Milan earlier this year and she has also created a range of products and furniture made from concrete – see all projects by Matali Crasset.

A chair with armrests that extend to form a protective loop around the sitter was popular on Dezeen this week – see all furniture design.

Here’s some more information about the exhibition from Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac:

Matali Crasset, Voyage to Uchronia, Pantin

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is delighted to be hosting matali crasset’s project Voyage en Uchronie (‘Voyage to Uchronia’) in our Pantin gallery. Following the exhibition of the blobterre at the Centre Pompidou in 2012, Voyage to Uchronia, crasset’s fifth exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, continues her reflection on experimental environments.

Voyage to Uchronia is a fiction that takes place in a separate time. This exhibition questions notions of utopia and rituals, which are central elements in matali crasset’s practice.

The exhibition is made up of a series of furniture pieces, the Permanents, built around the same structure and a film directed with Juli Susin of the Royal Book Lodge, titled Voyage to Uchronia, salvatico è colui che si salva.

The Permanents

Voyage to Uchronia brings together a group of furniture, the Permanents, that evoke a group of humans and their rituals.

The Permanents are built around a unique form that envelops the body and is present through its various activities. The module partially surrounds the body whilst standing, seated or laying down. The folded form protects the head, inviting us to meditate. The exterior grey color accentuates it’s protective side, the interior has orange areas highlighting an invitation to read, to sit, to lay down, to see, to remember, to listen…

These structures are in their simplest forms, closest to the human being. We recognize in the different elements in this scheme that evoke a primitive life: a chair, a cabinet of curiosities, a portrait gallery, a wooden bell, a puppet, one to lay down in, one used for thinking, for concentrating in and a module to meet others, composed of several Permanents. The pieces are made in felt, a material evoking protection and the unchanging.

Voyage to Uchronia: salvatico è colui che si salva

This film was born out of a collaboration between matali crasset and Juli Susin realized through his collaborative platform: the Royal Book Lodge. It is their first film together and includes Julia Rublow’s participation.

In the forest where the mystical mathematician Pythagoras lived and died, a tribe carries out imaginary rituals. Against the backdrop of water, air and sun, Uchronia’s universe unfolds, a world born out of a collision of figures and colors.

Do other worlds appear and disappear on the way to ours? What remains? Were the numbers at the origin of forms and colors there before us? This transformation of the Pythagorean question where the origin of our civilization crosses path with the future, is a temporal transgression and colorful introspection that gives birth to the film with a pulsating and hypnotic rhythm.
At the end of the film a herd of wild boar gathered around an airplane evoke Leonardo da Vinci’s metaphor “Salvatico è colui che si salva,” which means “Wild he who saves himself.”

Flee into the air? Flee in a dream? Flee in space? Flee human beings?

The artist will always remain an enigma.

About Uchronia

In 1936, Régis Messac offered this definition of Uchronia in Primaires, the review he edited: “An unknown country, discovered by the philosopher Renouvier, located at a remove from time or outside time, to which, like old moons, events that might have happened but did not are relegated”.

The word was invented by Charles Renouvier, who used it in the title of his 1876 novel Uchronie, l’utopie dans l’histoire, (‘Utopia in History’).

Uchronia is a 19th century neologism constructed on the pattern of ‘Utopia’, which Thomas More coined in 1516 as the title of his famous book Utopia. Where the Greek elements ‘u-topia’ suggested ‘no-place’ (ou – topos), ‘u-chronia’ suggests ‘no-time’ (ou-chronos in Greek). Etymologically, therefore, the word designates non-existent time.

This project is part of the Designer’s Days 2013 program.

The post Voyage to Uchronia by Matali Crasset
at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac appeared first on Dezeen.

Stationery and ring-bound sheets of paper influenced this collection by Westminster fashion graduate Sophie Nuttall.

“I fused various white and cream fabrics, mainly neoprene, to create structure and reflect the vast blank space of a page aspiring to the subtle different tones of different pages,” Nuttall told Dezeen.

Small holes were laser cut along the edges of fabric, mimicking paper punctured down its binding edge. “Trying to mimic the printer paper from my childhood with its hole perforated edges, I loved the idea of something being so blank and pure,” said Nuttall.

White circular reinforcements were implemented around larger eyelets that acted as arm, shoulder or head holes. Metal rings linked the holes together so no sewing was required and each piece was made detachable so it could be connected to others in various ways.

Square shapes were folded and draped to create a selection of silhouettes including rectangular and diamond shapes. Some materials were patterned with lines or grids to look like pages from a school exercise book.

Also at the Westminster BA Fashion show, Philli Wood presented pink and orange parkas printed with giant cable knits. Other 2013 graduate fashion collections we’ve written about include pastel garments moulded from knitwear and headdresses covered in colourful spikes.

See more fashion design »
See more 2013 graduate projects »

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Sophie Nuttall appeared first on Dezeen.

News: Italian furniture brand Kartell has announced that it will launch 50 flagship stores across China in the next five years.

Kartell has partnered with Chinese luxury goods company Gold Bond Enterprises, which is helping to manage Kartell’s rapid expansion in the country.

The first store opened in Beijing on 30 May and was designed by Kartell’s artistic director, Ferruccio Laviani, to “emphasize the quality, high design content, richness of materials and glamour associated with the brand.” New stores are scheduled to open in Shanghai and Chengdu over the summer.

“China, because of its size, importance and the complexity as a market required a targeted and wide-ranging plan,” said president and managing director of Kartell Claudio Luti, adding that the partnership with the Chinese company would help to “achieve concrete results in both the residential and the contract areas.”

“I feel that we need to promote Italian creativity around the world,” Luti told Dezeen in an interview last month, when he criticised Italian design companies for failing to invest in overseas expansion in the past, claiming the furniture industry made a “big, big mistake” by staying small and family-oriented while Italian fashion companies “decided to go and sell everywhere in the world.”

Luti has also taken on the presidency of Milan’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile, and told Dezeen about his plans to improve the visitor experience to the world’s most important furniture fair by clarifying its brand and tackling overpriced hotels and transport chaos in the city.

Founded on the production of laboratory equipment and best known now for innovative use of plastics in furniture, Kartell presented several new products in Milan this year, including furniture by Philippe Starck created using the world’s largest single-piece injection moulding and a plastic stool by Tokujin Yoshioka that resembles cut crystal – see all stories about Kartell.

While Kartell looks to expand, design brands around the world are looking for ways to tackle the industry shifts that production in emerging countries including China has generated. Watch our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movie report from Milan in which designers including Tom Dixon and Marcel Wanders talk about the race to keep ahead of skilled copyists.

See all of our stories about China.

Here’s some more information from Kartell:

Kartell in China – 50 single brand stores in 5 years

Kartell announces an intense schedule of single-brand store openings: 50 flagship stores over 5 years in the biggest centres of the Chinese market. The announcement marks the beginning of a partnership with Gold Bond Enterprises, a leader in the Chinese luxury sector. The first city to see the partnership take form is Beijing, where the Kartell flagship store and showroom opened on Thursday, 30 May 2013, in the Sanlitun Village. Summer openings are planned for Shanghai and Chengdu.

Milan, 14 June 2013 – Kartell is pleased to announce that it recently inaugurated its first single-brand store on Thursday, 30 May 2013 in Sanlitun Village as part of the agreement with the Chinese company, Gold Bond Enterprises.

The Beijing flagship store is the first to have a new luxury look designed by Ferruccio Laviani exclusively for Kartell. The design was created specifically to emphasize the quality, high design content, richness of materials, and glamour associated with the brand. Architects, clients and contractors will also be able to see the entire collection in the nearby 400 square-metre showroom.

The Beijing flagship store is only the first of a long series, and by summer 2013 there will be two more openings in Shanghai (at the APM department store, opening soon, and at the Kerry Center) and one in Chengdu at the ICF Mall.

According to Claudio Luti, President and Managing Director of Kartell, “China, because of its size, importance and the complexity as a market required a targeted and wide-ranging plan. That is why we decided to join forces with a Chinese company, a leader in the luxury sector, such as Gold Bond Enterprises, with a 10-year agreement which will allow us to enter this market with the best approach. The GB Kart Ltd. is the result of the joint venture and will represent our brand and distribute Kartell products (rigorously Made in Italy). We are confident that through these synergies we will achieve concrete results in both the residential and the contract areas.”

Linda Lin, President of Gold Bond Enterprises, adds “Gold Bond Enterprises Ltd. and Kartell have combined their experience and created GB Kart Ltd. which will develop a single brand retail plan together with Kartell and will distribute its products exclusively in China.” Thanks to Linda Hong Lin’s extensive experience in distribution and Claudio Luti’s continuous design research, this joint venture is an important step in introducing Kartell’s iconic and glamour design to the Chinese market. And it will offer a unique experience to Chinese consumers who are always on the lookout for the latest in Italian excellence.

About Kartell

A leading design company, founded by Giulio Castelli in Milan in 1949, and today under the leadership of Claudio Luti, Kartell is one of the companies that has symbolised Made in Italy design for over 60 years. A success story told through an incredible series of products: lamps, furniture, accessories, and interior design items made of plastic which have become part of the domestic landscape if not veritable icons of contemporary design. Today Kartell has a sales network with 120 single brand stores, 200 shops-in-shop and more than 2500 retailers throughout the world.

About Gold Bond Enterprises

Gold Bond Enterprises Ltd was born out of the passion for style and design. The Chinese company established and headed by Linda Hong Lin since 1993 is a leader in the luxury goods sector with a long line of successes in positioning and development of various prestigious Made in Italy brands in a highly competitive market such as the Chinese one. The mission of Gold Bond Enterprises Ltd. has always been to select the companies representing Italian excellence and to make them an integral part of the life of Chinese consumers who are keen for the latest, for elegance and for style. Gold Bond Enterprises Ltd. now has 10 of the most prestigious Italian brands and a sales network of about 130 direct single brand stores in China and Hong Kong.

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over the next five years appeared first on Dezeen.