Slow-tech interiors for fast times
Say au revoir to the era of bling-bling, the chi-chi and tra-la-la.
With the world reeling from financial meltdown, greedy hedge fund hogs and It bag omnivores with their glitzy interiors are suddenly so passé and totally déclassé. For the trend forecasters at Maison & Objet in Paris, it’s time to go slow, be more conscientious and simplify, simplify, simplify!
The world is already too complex, uncertain, untidy and cluttered, so let’s just focus on the essential. Let’s return to the essence: the land and our roots. Land and local produce should be valued again. Urbanites who feel disenfranchised should appreciate a new balance between the city and the countryside. Nature and technology should finally put man back in the heart of the ecosystem with space for the elegance of modest, humble objects.
SLOW-TECH by Francois Bernard
This space has been lost, according to Francois Bernard, “because of the fast pace of ephemeral, constant change in the home, which is exhausting and does not meet any real needs, destabilizing more than reassuring.” Blame it on the ambiguous relation between fashion and the home, making us believe that the colors of our sofas mutate in the summer and walls change their skin as often as one changes one’s outfits for the season. “This reduces the words humor, poetry, celebration, unique and privileged moments to a collection of trinkets — a vulgar aesthetic newly baptized as ‘Baroque.’”
To stop this rise of compulsive tackiness, architects, designers and manufacturers are researching, creating and giving a new spirit to our way of living. A major direction in opposition to the whimsical aesthetic of yore is for things to regain substance. Design becomes more angular, heavier and grounded. Objects display their manufacturing process: screws, bolts, welding marks and molded seams are visible. There’s a preference for industrial materials like metal grills, rough molding and sheet metal, definitely a world away from the previous predilection for the aesthetics of illusion and fantasy. Things now reacquire their thickness and weight.
The Slow-Tech school traces its lineage to the architects and engineers of the 20th century like Le Corbusier and Prouvé, and validates its aesthetic with handmade design, reaffirming the unique characteristics of each product and giving importance to both the creation and the creator. There is an underlying quest for humanization and a cultural dialogue with local and regional traditions. Folklore from Central Europe and Scandinavia is a rich source of inspiration, reviving motifs that satisfy our desire for narrative textiles. Natural representations like the bird shape become emblematic of graphic simplicity and charming naiveté.
Bernard qualifies, though, that “handmade” and “folk” do not reduce this poetic and creative perspective to a pre-scientific era that banishes scientific thought: “The technologies are passives and multiply their incursions for a better quality of life and harmlessly insure the environment of the house: pools naturally filtered by plants, sand and stones, geothermic heating, home bio-dynamic agricultural systems, replacing the petrochemical solvents with the agro-solvents. They seduce by their simple virtues and physical principles understood by everyone.”
Slow-Tech objects meet a host of moral conditions that sharpen our desire, which was once reduced to an act of possession. They are objects of quality because of their mode of production which is safe and respectful, and with the aim that they are made to last.
FARM LIFE by Elizabeth Leriche
To simplify our lives and interiors, Elizabeth Leriche takes us back to the farm and creates a new agri-culture. Like Bernard’s Slow-Tech, this style is looking for substance but finds it by getting its feet and hands in the earth. It’s a rediscovery of the animal and vegetable beauty of the agricultural world, where rooted objects cultivate the peaceful authenticity of raw materials and artisanal know-how.
“This desire for simpler materials and objects is the result of a quest to rediscover the relationship between design and function after several seasons of design as decoration,” says Leriche. “Handmade objects, local production and artisan work are responses to globalization, rehabilitating the idea of collective memory and olden-day rituals. A global reality drives the need for an emerging regional approach that is increasingly sectarian and fragmented.”
In contrast to the ’70s’ “Back to Nature” movement, which contested the modern world and “technical progress,” Farm Life uses the most contemporary techniques to save and rehabilitate nature.
THE METROPURITANS By Vincent Gregoire of Agence Nelly Rodi
Vincent Gregoire’s Metropuritans are the new millennium’s activists waging new acts of resistance against a consumerist, wasteful world. Camouflaged in an apparently elegant starkness, these ecological urbanites herald a desire for asceticism with a virtual military rigor. These militants of a healthy life ecology are building utopias of survival characterized by subsistence and frugality tinged with sensuality. With the “inconvenient truth” of an ecological threat, Metropuritans are going radical to save the planet, transforming their lives into a moral imperative.
Like the other two styles, Metropuritans are obsessed with ideas of solidity, effectiveness and pragmatism found in military organizations. Discipline and order are used to further their ideals of organic, ethical consumption, desirable development and fair trade. Camouflage prints and shades of olives and browns are the more obvious manifestations in design, but more important are no-nonsense qualities of functionality, durability and, of course, eco-friendliness.
This monastic minimalism is obviously turning its back on hedonism, which has been indifferent to environmental concerns. It evokes a “less is more” generation that consumes “less but better,” matching their lifestyle with their conscience. “But in no way do they want to turn into hippies in the farmlands of the French countryside or the American desert,” warns Gregoire. “In the beating heart of the city, the Metropuritans are on a crusade against ultra-consumerism and fighting to re-enchant the city.”
An increasingly seen militant act is the planting of vegetation in the urban jungles. Guerilla gardeners plant flowers in the concrete of public spaces “in order to soften a brutal world with lashings of seeds.”
A group called “The Poetic Party,” founded by the urban plastic artist and beekeeper Olivier Darné, has made it their mission to pollen-ize the city by raising bees in urban spaces to produce a delicious Concrete Honey. The California-based Compactors movement, in order to stop squandering and lessen waste, has a vow of consumer chastity: purchasing no new products for a year. Like the disciples of voluntary simplicity who choose to simplify their lives in order to live better, these new resistors are looking to save the planet through decrease.
In Southern France, the Locavores do another form of eco-warfare by privileging the local over the far-flung, which uses too much fossil fuel. They have been espousing local sourcing through the consumption of food grown or produced only within a 100-mile radius. “Farewell to strawberries in winter and exotic products. It’s back to the cycle of nature and the vegetable patch.”
Are all these manifestos for simplicity and new utopias just dreamer’s initiatives that will all be forgotten when the economy improves and the times get better? Is it really a pendulum shift from ornate embellishment and decoration, which has been a la mode for the past couple of years and a source of pleasure in the home? Things will definitely not change overnight but with the growing awareness of so many “inconvenient truths” in all spheres of our lives in this planet, our way of living and decorating will definitely not be the same.
