Bakery Studio: Flat 3D

Design Museum Holon presents the Israelian design studio Bakery, founded in 2009, and its work on the tension between critical judgment and imagination.

Flat 3D: Bakery Design Studio Fold Chairs at Design Museum Holon

“Bakery Design Studio was established in 2009 by Gilli Kuchik and Ran Amitai, who met and became design and life partners during their studies in the Department of Industrial Design at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design.

They developed their first joint project into a furniture series called NOM. The prototype for the series was first shown at Milan Design Week 2010, following which Italian furniture company Cappellini acquired the manufacturing rights. The series went into production in 2012, and has since featured in the company’s catalogue. In 2014 the series won the prestigious Red Dot Best of the Best Award in the furniture category.

NOM, which stands for Nature of Material, is a series of stackable lightweight furniture. Each object is folded from a spread of laser-cut aluminum sheet, which is then bent into its final form. At first glance the items in the series look simple and unpretentious, but they are actually the product of a long process of investigation, experimentation, and refinement; a conceptual, material, and practical process, which enabled the two designers to create an accurate and successful product.

A great deal has been written about the ability of designers to focus design processes into a final product that not only contains all the values required from it, but also maintains design currency, as well as one of the most difficult values to express – effortlessness. The chairs in the series do not reflect the long hours of work, deliberation, research, and numerous experiments that attended their making – they are visually light, clear to the observer, and are not burdened with superfluous design messages or concepts.

Ken Robinson opens one of his famous lectures on creativity thus: ‘Creativity is a multi-faceted process. It involves many ordinary abilities and some specialized skills and techniques; it can be fostered by many different ways of thinking, and it draws on critical judgment as well as imagination, intuition, and often gut feelings’.

The tension between critical judgment and imagination serves as one of the main tools in the work of Bakery Design Studio – like their studio, the designers’ work process is organized within clearly ordered spatial structures in which creative chaos can erupt for a moment, which nonchalantly invites new and surprising thinking. In the middle of a photo shoot for the exhibition, the photographer, Itay Benit, asks Ran Amitai to ‘please take a metal sheet and do something with it’.

Amitai takes the sheet to the vise, and unassumingly starts working it without any preplanning – totally intuitively. At the conclusion of the short series of shots – no more than ten minutes – he announces: ‘Galit, we’ve made you a fruit platter – we’ve got a new product’. All I could do was walk over, take pictures of it, and be excited by the fact that I was able to be there at the very moment a new idea was born: it is primitive, crude, coarse, unwieldy – but considering the two designers who will lead it with their precise and ordered creative process that is so characteristic of them, it can evolve into the next big thing.” Galit Gaon, Chief Curator