Test your Design IQ
MANILA, Philippines - Who is the London-born designer who is known for his wit and elegance and for revitalizing rationalist design? Known as one of today’s most influential industrial designers, he has designed everything from a tray table to a tram system for the German city of Hannover.
He was born in London in 1959, and grew up in New York City when his advertising executive father was assigned to the US. A year after studying design at Kingston Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art, he opened his office for design in London.
His early inspirations came from his grandfather’s study — a light, bright room furnished in the modernist style, an Eileen Gray exhibition he saw at Victoria and Albert Museum, and the work of modernist pioneers such as Buckminster Fuller, Gerald Summers, Jean Prouve and Le Corbusier.
He also initially manufactured the items himself, using ready-made industrial materials and small workshops. Two early projects that gained attention were room installations, “Reuters News Center” for Documenta 8 in Kassel, and “Some Items for the New Home” in Berlin Design Werkstadt Exhibition, as part of the “Berlin, Cultural City of Europe” program. The simple concepts of these projects, which featured starkly reductive objectives, represented a reaction to the formal excesses of postmodernism.
He has since that time become a leading figure of New Simplicity, a movement that advocated a more modest and also more serious approach to design. He then began designing products for SCP in London, the German door handle producer FSB, the office furniture company Vitra, and with Italian furniture designer Cappellini.
In 1992, together with James Irvine, he organized Porjgetto Oggetto, a collection of household objects for Cappellini.
Some of these works include the design of Bottle, a plastic bottle rack for Magis, the Moon collection of porcelain dinnerware for Rosenthal, the Op-la tray table and Tin Family for Alessi and the Sim stacking chair for Vitra.
In 1995, he was awarded a DM500m project, then the biggest light rail project in Europe to design a new train system for the German City of Hannover. The first vehicle was presented to the public in June 1997 at the Hannover Industrail Fair and awarded the IF Transport Design Prize and the Ecology Award.
Experimenting with new materials and technologies, he designed the 1999 Low Pad Chair for Cappellini, which was inspired by Danish designer Poul Kjaerholm’s 1956 steel and leather chair, but used a new method of condensed upholstery to create a comfortable but durable leather seat. Another technical coup was the Air Chair in 1999, an elegant, relatively inexpensive molded dining chair made from a single piece of plastic using Magis’s new gas injector technology. He later collaborated with Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss architects of London’s Tate Modern Museum, to furnish its public spaces with his Low Pad Chairs and the 1998 Op-la tray table for Alessi.
More recent projects include the Luxmaster for Flos, a bench for Roppongi Hills development in Tokyo, an ATM desk system for Vitra, a line of kitchen appliances for Rowenta, pots and pans for Alessi, and a sanitary and brassware range for Ideal Standard.
Apart from his work, he has also participated in many exhibitions: the 1994 Interieur 94 exhibition in Belgium; a solo exhibition at Bordeaux’s Arc en Reve d’Architecture in 1995. More recent exhibitions and installations have included ”The State of Things” to complement the 1998 Design Year Book, as well as solo exhibitions at the Axis Gallery in Tokyo, for Flos, at the Yamaghwa Center in Tokyo, and as Designer of the Year 2000 at the Paris Design Fair.
He has also written several books, including A World Without Words, 1999; Everything But the Walls, 2002, and The International Design Yearbook, 1999.
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Last Week’s question: Who is the French pastry chef and cookbook author whose chocolate bar in Mauboussin’s Madison Avenue Boutique in New York is described as a chocolate jewelry shop?
Answer: Francois Payard
Winner: Christian Samonte of Pasay City
