Valerie, My Crystal Sister is a crystal chandelier, presented by Dutch designer Lucas Maassen in collaboration with Roche for the new Confrontations: Contemporary Dutch Design exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum.
At the beginning of his project, Maassen started by raising a question: is it possible to use
the biological process that created me
as a design process to create an object? The answer to this question took several
months. Together with Roche, he first
crystallized synthetic DNA fragments.
A magnified glass version of this crystal,
which is, of course, only visible under
the microscope, was then produced by
the Vienna-based crystal manufactory
Lobmeyr. One thousand such pieces will then form a crystal chandelier.
Ultimately, this project is about the visualization
of life. DNA is the basic code of
life, an essential part of every organism.
Every one of us contains DNA fragments
like the ones Lucas Maassen and Roche
crystallized and turned into a chandelier — including the designer's parents
and the sister that he never had because
his parents' marriage ended too soon.
Thinking of her, he called the project
Valerie, my Crystal Sister, according
to the name that his parents would
have chosen for him, had he been a girl.
The chandelier — and thus, their "crystal
daughter" — was be assembled by Maassen's
parents in a performance on 12 June.
Lucas Maassen has worked with the
sciences several times in the past. His
Nano Chair, for example, is the result of
a collaboration with a physicist and was
"built" using an ion milling technique.
Just five micrometres in size, this chair
is only visible through a special focused
ion beam microscope. Thus, Maassen
raises questions, like
when does a chair become a chair? What
size does an object need so that we call it
an object?
Valerie, My Crystal Sister
At the Vitra Design Museum, Dutch designer Lucas Maassen has created a chandelier with one thousand crystals derived from research on synthetic DNA fragments, using the biological process that created him to create an object.
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- Lucas Maassen,Mike Roelofs
- 15 June 2012
- Weil am Rhein
Based in Basel, Switzerland, Roche is a global healthcare company. Highly innovative and a world leader in invitro diagnostics and cancer drugs, it is specialized in two divisions, Pharmaceuticals and Diagnostics. Discovery Chemistry at Roche is a central science in Drug Discovery Research. Its expert team of medicinal and computational chemists focuses on the creation of small molecules as potential new medicines towards the improvement of patients' lives.