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Ronan Bouroullec (born 1971) and Erwan Bouroullec (born 1976) have been working together for some ten years. Their collaboration is a permanent dialogue nourished by their differing personalities and shared perfectionism.
In 1997 they presented their “Disintegrated Kitchen” at the Salon du Meuble in Paris and were spotted by Giulio Cappellini, who gave them their first industrial design projects, notably the Lit Clos and Spring Chair. In 2000, Issey Miyake asked them to design a space for his new collection of A-Poc clothes in Paris. Then came the decisive meeting with Rolf Fehlbaum, chairman of Vitra, which resulted in their conception of a new kind of office system, Joyn, in 2002. This was the beginning of a special partnership which has borne fruit in numerous projects, including Algues, the Alcove Sofa, the Worknest and the Slow Chair. Since 2004, the Bouroullecs have also been working with Magis, for whom they have designed two complete furniture collections, Striped and Steelwood. Finally, they have worked on several types of textile wall systems, such as the North Tiles, in close collaboration with the Kvadrat brand, for whom they designed a new Stockholm showroom in 2006.

Today, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec design for numerous manufacturers, notably Vitra, Kvadrat, Magis, Kartell, Ligne Roset, Issey Miyake and Cappellini. At the same time, they maintain an experimental activity which is essential to the development of their work at Galerie Kreo, Paris, where four exhibitions of their designs have been held between 2001 and 2008. They also undertake the occasional architectural project, such as the Maison Flottante in 2006.

 

www.bouroullec.com

 

 

Lena Bergström is one of Sweden’s best-known glass designers with a long career at Orrefors Glassworks, and she is also specialized in textiles. In her own words, she likes soft glass and hard textiles – her textiles often have a clear graphic expression, while her glass designs are more organic. Lena graduated from Konstfack’s textile department, and have won numerous awards since then, including 12 Excellent Swedish Design and 3 Elle Decoration Design Awards; and is represented by National museum in Stockholm, The Röhsska Museum of Fashion, Design and Decorative Arts in Gothenburg, the Cleveland Museum of Art in the United States, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

 

www.lenabergstrom.se

 

The Hanoi Lamp by Argentinean designer Federico Churba was created following an apparent simplicity for a harmonious complexity of shapes. This lamp is realized in one horizontal plane that acquires form and volume through the bends of the material. A formal simplicity defined by details. A warm and intimate light, like the kind gesture of someone bowing down in greeting.

 

www.once.com.ar

 

 

Australian architect Matt Gibson has designed a shop interior for the fashion retailer Fame Agenda, located in the Docklands of Melbourne, Australia.

Involving concepts of ‘transparency and illusion’ and bringing customers minds in-between interior and exterior this store plays on the perspective of the ‘arcade’. A random and organic set of arches inspired by Thomas Heatherwick’s sculptural works merge to form a cave like enclosure from within the confines of the rectilinear shell. Providing intimacy and protection from the elevated & wind blown Docklands promenade the organic arches intend to shift the visitor inwards toward the end of the awkward ‘L ‘shaped plan & at the same time provide merchandising benches, walls and ceiling. The arches partially cover existing structural piers & terminate with mirrored cladding behind the sales counter seemingly extending the space and encouraging a play on perspective.

 

www.fameagenda.com

 

Unforgetablet by designer An Sang Hyun, is another functional gadget that utilizes bar codes that is used on almost all the food people buy from supermarket and warns consumers about their expiry date by storing all their information before placing them in the refrigerator. All the food and beverages are registered along with the expiry date in the device before they are kept into the refrigerator; even users can set expiry dates for certain foods if they want. The device remains fixed on the refrigerator, showing necessary information on its black, glossy screen, and alarms whenever a food reaches to its expiry date.

 

The paintings, murals and installations of Esther Stocker, based on grid structures and on the colors black, white and gray, consistently manifest entanglements, interconnections, interpenetrations, both semantically and formally, for which the variably deployed grid motif functions as a metaphorical logo. Stocker consistently breaks with one-dimensional notions of order, space, and painting as contextual and relational factors and concepts. When an artist so persistently preoccupied with spatial structures and spatial experience, simultaneously calls attention to the fact that „we know nothing about space“ (Stocker), then her stance would seem to testify to a productive skepticism which arises from unremitting and methodical attempts at understanding, and from insight into their-in principle-interminability.

 

www.estherstocker.net

 

British artist Terry Haggerty has become known in recent years for paintings that express the formalist vocabulary of abstraction in a new way. The principle of serial composition can be discerned in Haggerty’s work: light-colored stripes alternate with darker ones to form regular, often horizontal arrangements, which also have a pattern-like quality due to their dense structure. This would not seem particularly remarkable were it not for the fact that Haggerty breaks this linear formation at the edges of the painting — and occasionally also at the symmetrical center of the composition—by bending the lines in a different direction as they approach the boundaries of the painting support. He combines humorous and historical references to form abstract compositions that electrify and manipulate the space around them.

 

www.terryhaggerty.net