During the Milan Furniture Fair, while the city was busy with the confrontation between ideas and the market, a number of designers showed they could adopt industrial production technologies to create objects animated by a special personality, and forms endowed with strong character. These objects conveyed a freedom of expression based on the statement of a personal vision, and not of a search for consensus without risk. Edited by Francesca Picchi. Photography by Ramak Fazel.

Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA Rabbit chair for nextmaruni, Maruni Wood Industry, Hiroshima
“The concept is very simple: to cut ready-made bended plywood along the lines of a rabbit drawn free-hand. We thought it would be a nice idea if just a simple cutting process could bring lightness, jauntiness and humor for users’ lives. We studied this small size very much to ensure the comfort for the users”. With her rabbit-shaped plywood chair, Sejima redesigns a modern archetype with style and irony: the bent plywood chair. After Jacobsen’s Ant chair (in 1952 it was the first Danish “industrial” chair), the design by Sejima, with measured aplomb, takes organic inspiration into the figurative.

Konstantin Grcic: Miura stool, for Plank, Ora (Bolzano)
“Talking about Miura makes it necessary for me to refer to another, previous project: chair_ONE. It is not unusual for one project to lead on from another, reacting to it, moving on from it, etc. The story of Miura must be told in relation to the chair in die-cast aluminium which I developed for Magis three years ago. In terms of technology and expression, chair_ONE was a break-through project, a work that already showed distinct traces of using the computer in the design process. The commission from Plank to work on a monoblock barstool created a perfect opportunity to take things one step further. While chair_ONE is just naked structure, a bare skeleton, Miura is structure with a computer-modelled skin. The approach was less pragmatic and more sculptural. Like the chair, Miura originates from a structural approach. Creating the principle construction of the stool was not done by computer, but rather by intuitive logic and hands-on experience of making furniture. The computer came into the project for modelling the complex free-form surfaces once we had established the stool’s overall geometry. During this phase in the process we made heavy use of rapid prototyping facilities. Feeding our CAD data directly into a laser-sintering machine (a kind of 3-D printer) made it possible to produce a series of life size models of the stool (or parts of it) in order to transform digital reality into a physical reality. Even though everything may look okay on the computer, I still find it crucial to verify the shape of the object by seeing it as a three-dimensional “thing”. Parallel to the design process we started forwarding our CAD files to the structural engineers from Area_3, who were using the data to perform dynamic stress simulation tests on the stool. In this way we were able to ensure that what we were designing was technologically feasible and statically strong enough. I am not sure if Miura follows a certain computer aesthetic or how different it would have looked without CAD. The good thing is that in the end it turned out to be what it was meant to be: a stool.” Konstantin Grcic 24.05.2005 

Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec: Facett collection for Ligne Roset, Briord (France)
“In a way our work was driven by two things: using numerically controlled sewing machines, and considering the sofa as some kind of block, a volume made out of foam. We knew the company has technology available for automating the production of sofas with numerically controlled machines, so it was quite natural for us to try and push the possibilities of this process. Let’s say it was really a sort of starting point for the design. We knew that these numerically controlled sewing machines are used to sew the tops of mattresses to make a sandwich out of fabric and foam. We sewed the fabric onto a thin layer of foam that is roughly one centimetre thick. Normally, the fabric is rather loose but with the sewing we were able to make the fabric behave more like a piece of cardboard and give it more structure. Somehow the seam was also used as a folding point. So in the end, the sewing has a kind of double role. Firstly it creates the sandwich out of fabric and foam, and secondly it makes this sandwich able to be folded up like cardboard. In the end, the work we did was more like that of a tailor. Because the seams also work as folding points, we had to define them down to the smallest detail during the prototyping phase. This is because any variation would force us to reconsider the overall design. It was quite an unusual process for designing furniture. We even had to do a lot of CAD and 3-D modelling on the computer, which we would never usually do for a sofa because you work directly on the maquette. So really the computer played a full part in the whole process. Regarding the use of a diamond shape, I must say that the form we ended up with was a natural result of what we wanted to achieve with the technical process: being able to fold the fabric along the seam lines. ... I don’t have any clear point of view on the facet shape and its relation to computers, but one thing that is clear is that now the computer has more of a role in design and it is possible to generate new forms. The computer is opening some doors but it’s also closing others. The designer’s job more and more resembles the work of computer graphics, because from a 3-D file a tool can be directly machined, and I don’t know what this will mean for us...” Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec 18.05.2005

Ettore Sottsass, Christopher Redfern with Zoran Jedrejcic sedia Trono for Segis, Poggibonsi (Siena)
“This chair is slightly different from the others because it is a wooden chair made of plastic. Actually, it’s a peasant’s chair, not a Parisian one… It is a ‘wooden’ chair because the design retraces an ancient frame… Its thicknesses are considerable… I would have liked to make them even thicker… And then it is a chair with a hat. This is a new idea: putting a hood on it and transforming it into a small armchair. With these hats you can change their colour too, and create numerous combinations… ...It never entered my head to say that design is dead, that industry has killed it. I only said that I don’t like having to deal with marketing people, because all they think about is profit. They are only businessmen and they don’t understand a thing about design. I am not so naïve as to refuse industry…However, there is industry and industry… There are small manufacturers and vast industrial plants, murderous corporations and nice little factories… I am convinced that the destiny of design is also the destiny of industry, because industrialists need design. Museums don’t. …I really don’t know how a design museum can exist. If I put an object on a pedestal – for example a chair – this act makes no sense at all, it means nothing. When there is a chair in a museum, everybody tries to use it, they try to sit on it. In fact there are notices saying ‘Please do not sit on this chair’… I always say there is a difference between ‘design’ and ‘industrial design’. Design is as old as man. When he is conscious of existing in the universe, man designs, he designs on rocks, he engraves and makes holes in a bone… Industrial design is another matter. It is expressed in the making of products and the products are used. They are not a religious outlet, or even a striving after the unknown. They are simply used. Besides, there is a big difference between when I dress to make myself betterlooking and when I use an object because I need it. I have done plenty of razor-edge things, but then I also worked for thirty years with a real industrial company… Today I continue to work, but only with people I get on well with. For example with these chair manufacturers. They have an art director who is an architect... with whom we can talk… We show him trial projects, we do and we undo…: this is what working with industry is all about. What I can’t stand is when after you have worked on a design, the marketing people step in to lay down their rules and tell you things like ‘green doesn’t sell’. Nobody talks any more today about what design really is. There is an awful lot of talk about the fact that Italian design sells all over the world and about how famous it is… This is a politico-economic factor which I certainly don’t think about when I design. I am fed up to the back teeth with this rhetoric about made in Italy… ... I must also say that when I look at the magazines, Domus included, and when I open, say, the page on chairs, I find 50 chairs all alike, just a tiny bit different. They are all design… but they are a product catalogue. ... Today everyone is afraid of China. I am working with the Chinese. The fact is that if today, Thursday, we were to send off, for example, this model to China, by next Thursday we would get a prototype of it back in stainless steel. It is useless to run down China. We would do better to take a good hard look at ourselves.” From a conversation with Ettore Sottsass Milan, 12.05.2005