Thank you. Thank you, David. Thank you for the introduction and thank you for inviting me here. It's the first time I've been to this part of Spain and I've only just arrived today, but from what I've seen so far, it's stunning. I had a tour of the cathedral earlier which was pretty breathtaking and also quite almost scary when you end up on the roof on that sloped roof and no guardrails, so it's not very British.
So I am here. I understand that, as David said, this is not the normal course of the talks that you have. So this is going to definitely be a departure. And what I've decided to do is to sort of turn my presentation into two parts. Firstly, a sort of not greatest hits, but some of the things that we've done over the last 30 years, hopefully giving you some breadth into the different things that we do in terms of scale, in terms of the type of manufacturer. And then I'm going to, in slightly more detail, run through three projects at the end to explain a little bit more about the process and why we do things.
So I suppose I should start here. This was in 1997 or 1998. Boys, you see — I mean, we always think we still look a bit like this. Obviously we don't. This was in our first studio, which was in a tower block in West London called Trellick Tower, and it was just the two of us for the first year and a half. As David said, we studied architecture. You can see we were still working on drawing boards in those days, pre-computers, which we loved. And I think actually that's one of the biggest influences in our design — is the fact that we drew everything with a pencil or a pen and we still do to this day.
I have no idea how a computer works. As my wife will tell you, I can do emails and that's about it really. So the thing about design and also architecture is it's about collaboration. There's no aspect of design that isn't collaborative. And for the two of us, we both came from relatively large families. We both had two brothers, so we knew what it was like to both collaborate and to fight. So we were sort of trained before we met in that respect.
And the most important thing I think as a designer is to listen and to understand what it is that you're trying to do. Understand the problems, understand the manufacturer, understand the engineers around you telling you what's possible, what isn't possible, what might have to change. And it's really, I think, the biggest talent as a designer. So, if I can start — this is the first piece of furniture.
We started doing small architectural projects when we left college. We didn't actually get a job. It's partly probably because we were unemployable, but also it was a very bad time. It was a recession. We came out in a recession and there weren't so many jobs around. So we started working on small house conversions and we worked on a little bar restaurant in South Kensington. And for that project, we designed this table, which is a low sort of coffee table, and the idea was to have two levels — one for putting your drinks on and the second level for storing ashtrays. Which obviously is a bit out of date now, but it's very good for storing magazines.
But you'll see in our first pieces of design were really informed by sheet material. We were making our architectural models out of cardboard and it was the easiest material at hand, I suppose. And we were making furniture out of cardboard in these little models. And then we translated them into plywood. And we spent probably the first two or three years designing everything in plywood. And we found a fantastic manufacturer called Isokon in London who'd actually been producing furniture in London since 1935 and had produced furniture for many of the great immigrants, some from the Bauhaus — Marcel Breuer for one — and they were still producing plywood in London.
So we found them and we had a great relationship. So good in fact that we moved our studio to be next door to them. So these are just exercises really in structure for us. So chairs, tables, and we just got very drawn into this idea of folding material to give strength. And that sort of proliferated into this — was the first industrial product we ever designed, which was a desk lamp for a company called Flos in Italy. And that also ran through this sort of idea of folding and structure moved into some of our other projects.
This was a little building that we did on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles for H&M. That's just a little detail — it's a folded aluminium facade. But alongside that, we were also working in solid wood, other materials. This was a bench that we designed for a cathedral — Portsmouth Cathedral in the UK. There's something very beautifully tactile about solid wood. It's something that we've always loved to work with.
People often say, 'What was your favourite material?' Well, it's impossible to say. Every material has its merits and every material has its challenges. And along the way, we've worked, I would say, in pretty much any material that you can make something out of. And in different scales, too. This is a range of sort of household tabletop products that we designed for a company called Royal Doulton in the UK, which consisted of wooden platters, stainless steel cutlery. We had a range of dinner service, teapots, jugs and so on. And actually that was a really interesting project for us because it really brought the scale from furniture down. I think it was probably our first really smaller-scale design.
Let me say that we have always loved working with craftspeople. We call ourselves industrial designers but we really want to connect at all times with craft. And that means what that might only be with a prototyping process if it's a mass-produced product. But we also work very closely — whether it's through, for example, this project, which is a porcelain lamp which we've designed for Hermès in Paris. We work a lot with them actually and we do a lot of — obviously quite expensive — but incredible quality of craftsmanship. I mean, just to give you the idea of the scale of this lamp, this porcelain lamp, it's a huge thing, almost impossible to make at that scale.
We also work in Sweden with a great company, Kasthall, which we're actually sitting on a Kasthall carpet, I think one of David's designs. So working with textiles — so porcelain, textiles. We work a lot in Venice, in Murano. We worked with a company called Venini for 25 years, I think. The first time we worked with them was to design a door handle for a store in the Meatpacking District in New York back in 2001, I think it was. Anyway, this is a vase that we designed for Venini. And this is again in the workshops. I mean, just spending a few days in Venice working in the workshops there is a magical experience. And any of you who've not been, I would highly recommend it on your next trip to Venice. It's a magical experience to see sand turned into these incredible objects.
We also work with — well, this is a slightly extraordinary project. It's actually a production dining table for a company called B&B Italia. But this particular version that you see was done in two types of marble — Carrara marble and Alpi Verde. And this is a table that we designed for the ten-year anniversary of this table. It had been a big success for B&B Italia and they wanted to celebrate it with a special edition. And they said, 'Make it feel Italian. It needs to feel really Italian.' So having studied the architecture of Siena, Orvieto and many other places in Italy where striped buildings are quite common, we used the exact same marble and used the exact idea of that layering of the two colours to create this piece.
But not everything we do is expensive and for the luxury market. We've worked over the last fifteen years in Japan with a lantern maker called Ozeki. Now this is a company which I've always admired and often been intrigued by the shapes, the forms that they can produce out of paper. And I was on holiday in Japan fifteen, sixteen years ago and was in an area called Gifu where this place is. And so I'd written to them and said, 'I'd really love to come and see because I'm always fascinated to see how things are made.' And they said, 'Yeah, sure. You can come along.' And sure enough, I went to this tiny factory. This is where they produce all the lamps for Isamu Noguchi — the Akari lamps that you'll probably have seen around.
Anyway, after the tour of the factory, I said, 'Could — would you ever consider working with a designer outside of Japan?' Because at the time they never had. And Mr. Ozeki said to me, 'No.' And I said, 'Oh, that's okay. Well, I'll tell you what I'll do — I'll send you some drawings and if you think they might be interesting, then let's see what happens.' Anyway, I sent him some drawings and within a year we had produced the first lamp with him. And we've been producing — I think we have about ten or twelve different designs now.
Actually, this is back to Hermès, which is — this is a table. You see, the thing is about Jay and I, we like to explore. We like to work in different ways. Whether it's a different material, a different industry, a different scale, we like a challenge. And so the great thing about working with a company like Hermès is that there are not really so many limits. So you can kind of do what you want. And this is a table that's made from cast bronze. It's a low table. It was originally conceived in marble, I think. And then we discovered this incredible foundry and so we decided to make it in bronze.
But we also work in higher volume, let's say. So higher volume means typically, obviously, a lower cost and maybe a more accessible price point. Democratic, I'd like to think. The problem is, as you may have noticed, that when you produce something, you imagine it will be a certain price and when it's launched, you're always shocked at how expensive it is, because things are expensive to produce these days.
But this particular project is a chair which we designed with an American company called Emeco. And they approached us and said, 'Listen, we have a new type of plastic. It's made completely from recycled Coca-Cola bottles and Coca-Cola is supplying them with the material, but it goes beyond that. We've now found a way where we can grind up the same material and reuse it to make the chairs. So you can, in theory, take ten chairs, grind them up, and make ten new chairs.' And this was a first. This was — I'm not quite sure how long ago — about seven or eight years ago. So the design was informed by that material. The idea was to use as little as possible. So a lightweight chair, a chair that was stackable, and by rotationally stacking, obviously it takes a much smaller footprint as well. So the idea was that for restaurants, you could really — if you had them outside, when you bring them in, you could use quite a small area to store them.
The chair was called On and On because obviously talking about the material, the fact that you could use it on and on, and obviously the fact that this chair would stack on and on. And the concept for this project went one step further, which was that instead of buying the chairs, we had this idea with Emeco that potentially they could lease the chairs. They could lease the chairs to, I don't know, Starbucks, for example. So if there was any damage or breakage or scratching, they could then send the chair back and they would then grind it up, make new chairs, and supply them with a new one. And it was a really, really interesting business model. Unfortunately, I think it was a little bit too advanced at the time. I mean, maybe even today as well. But it was a fascinating idea.
Another project which is very much mass-produced — this is probably the highest-volume product that we do at the moment. This is another light for Flos. And this project came about because the technology had advanced to such a point where you could have a battery. This project is ten years old now. Batteries had got to the point where actually they could last for maybe ten or twelve hours, whereas before that previously maybe only a couple of hours, three hours, in which case there's not really any sense to have a rechargeable lamp. And it was funny because the owner of Flos was in our studio telling us about this, and on the side in the studio we had a torch and a little Japanese rice bowl, and we put the rice bowl over the torch and this beautiful light came down. And we all just looked at each other and said, 'Right, let's make it.'
This is a chair that we've just launched, actually, two weeks ago in Milan at the Furniture Fair, the Salone. And this is a cast aluminium chair for a company called Kartell. It's something that I'm particularly pleased with. I think as a designer — maybe also with architecture — you tend to like your most recent projects. I mean, you have a few old favourites, you know, sort of part of the family, but it's always the latest one that's the most interesting. So for me at the moment, this is one of my favourites.
I'm just going to move into another slightly different section of our work. We work also with galleries. So we design pieces that are limited editions. We design pieces that are commissions as well. And that's a really interesting area for us to explore and experiment with things that aren't so constricted by manufacturing techniques or costs. This is a table that we did for a gallery in London. This is made out of aluminium. Each piece is machined from aluminium and anodised, which is an industrial colouring process to protect the aluminium.
We also work with a gallery in Paris. We did a series of lamps called Signals, which is hand-blown glass and an aluminium body of the lamp. There was a whole series of different ones. Slightly ambiguous in the way people look at it and think — is it — the reason it was Signals is because it was ambiguous, because it could be projecting a signal or receiving a signal. Some people thought, 'Oh, it's a speaker.' But this area gives us opportunities to experiment.
And again, for the gallery world, this is a solid oak desk that we've done for Galerie Kreo. Again, we're looking at how to deconstruct a sofa. I mean, Dan asked, 'How do we need another sofa?' Well, here we are. You've got another one. Very comfortable, actually. So instead of having everything buried underneath a piece of fabric, we decided to expose the frame, have the same webbing that you would have, and actually the quilts themselves become the cushion. And of course, you can change the colour of your sofa if you so wish.
Two other commissions. So we also have commissions that come to us that people always say, 'What project would you love to do? What's the project that you're burning to desire to do?' Quite often those are projects that you don't even know that they're going to come your way. And the first one of these was a coin we designed for the Royal Mint in the UK. They asked us to design a coin to commemorate the 150 years of the London Underground. So this was the coin that we designed.
And a second project that came our way, which we weren't necessarily expecting, was the torch for the London 2012 Olympic Games, which was a fascinating project. I won't have — I don't have time to go into great detail here, but it was a competition. And I think the reason that our design was most desired was that we'd really thought about the story behind it. It wasn't just a nice shiny object. The design of it embodied the story of the torch relay, in a sense that if you look at the body of the — the shape of the top there, it's a triangular form. And the reason for that was that the London Games — there had been three London Games: 1908, 1948, I think, and 2012. So there was one side for each Games. And the holes in the torch — there were 8,000 holes in the torch, one hole to represent each one of the 8,000 runners that were in the relay. And there were many more layers to it than that, but just to give you a flavour of it.
And this was the lucky man to run with the very first torch. This was in Olympia, just after the first torch had been lit from the sun's rays, which is quite an interesting ceremony if you look it up online.
So now, what is the role of a designer? And that's a very good question, and it's not something I can necessarily answer. But I've put three sort of questions here: to solve problems that exist with current everyday objects, to improve people's lives through the things they use, and to innovate. These are all things that we discuss in our studio the whole time. They're all definitely relevant, but these are just the starting point.
Some projects are very simple. If you're designing a table, it's not something that you're going to particularly innovate with. It's an archetype that we're all very familiar with. You can look at different materials, but you're not going to reinvent the table, probably. I mean, maybe one day. So we often talk in the studio about archetypes, and if there's a way — and occasionally we do — if you can reinvent an archetype, but not just for the sake of it, because you're really improving what's already out there, something that's already existed for maybe quite a period of time, then we see that as a sort of — not the ultimate goal — but a challenge and something that we hope to achieve.
And I'm going to run through three projects — not too much detail — but three projects where we feel that the idea of challenging an existing archetype was actually quite relevant. The first was a chair that we designed for schools. Now, this man here is a chap called Rolf Fehlbaum, who's the owner of Vitra, which is an amazing furniture company in Switzerland. And he's sitting on the very first prototype that we brought to him.
We were looking at school furniture in the UK, which sadly is a slightly pitiful situation. The average spend for a school chair in the UK is £11, which is about 14, I think, 15 maybe. And obviously a lot of the chairs are not fit for purpose, uncomfortable. And we challenged the Royal Society of Arts to see if we could come up with a new chair for British schools.
And we did a lot of research and we realised that it had been done in the 60s, 70s and 80s that if children can move while they're studying, they can improve their concentration quite dramatically. The reason for that is that they're using their muscles, they're using their leg muscles primarily. Therefore, you're getting more blood flow and you're getting more oxygen to the brain. And it only takes a little bit more oxygen to the brain to improve concentration quite considerably. So we set about to design a chair that had some movement. Having spoken to many schools, they also just said it has to stack, it has to be quiet because when kids move the chairs around it's a nightmare, and other factors. But the main reason was movement, and the other thing was posture. If you can sit forward, obviously your spine is kept straighter. So in long periods of time, it's much better for you.
The first rig that I showed you was a sort of spring idea. Unfortunately, that didn't work because obviously everyone's a different weight. So if you're quite heavy, you tend to sink quite low, and if you're light, you don't really manage to bend the chair forward enough. So in a slightly — well, we'd had a couple of drinks, I think, at the time and we were in a bar in Manhattan in the Maritime Hotel, and this is the actual piece of paper where we said, 'Well, why don't we do a rocking chair? So instead of it rocking back, what if it rocks forward?'
So back to the studio we started strapping bits of wood to chairs to see if — what if — you know, if this worked. And actually it worked incredibly well. The tricky part was to try and get the balance between the flat sitting and the forward tilt. But after, I think, about fifty prototypes, we got it about right. And so this chair, called the Tip Ton chair, was born. So you have the normal sitting position and then you have a ninety-degree tilt forward. So that gives you the possibility to move in a controlled way which isn't dangerous, so the kids don't fall off the back of the chair, but it also gives you a forward position where it's impossible to slouch, because when you do, the chair just tips back. So it really improves posture.
This chair has been on the market for — I think it was 2011, so fifteen years — and every year the sales are still growing. Admittedly, when it was launched, it was a bit of a slow start, let's say. People were a bit confused until they tried it. And then when they tried it, they were, 'Oh, this is really, this is quite interesting.' And I think it was a success but also a failure at the same time. The failure part was that we couldn't get it cheap enough for many schools, but the success was the function, which is in my opinion the main thing, because maybe one day the price could come down.
But what you'll see is that in higher education, where the budgets are higher, you'll see it quite a lot actually — in architecture schools quite a lot, design schools, ETH in Switzerland, the whole school, Royal College of Art, St. Martins in London, and the headquarters of Lego in Denmark. You know, it's gradually finding its way into lots and lots of different places. This was just an installation we did of the chairs in Paris at a time a few years ago.
The second project, which sort of leads on — it's also a seating project. New archetypes are not born through design research alone. New archetypes come through social change. So as a designer, you have to be aware of your surroundings and be aware of what changes are either happening now or about to happen that you can address.
And one of the things that we started noticing back in probably 2008, 2009, shortly after the financial crash, was that obviously a lot of people lost their jobs and soon after that a large freelance community started to grow around the world. And with the proliferation of Wi-Fi, smartphones, it meant that people could work from anywhere. And so they did. People were starting to work from home, but actually we're all social beings and no one really wants to be stuck at home on their own. So people started working in cafés or restaurants or hotel lobbies.
And so this picture here demonstrates the situation — this was in Shoreditch in London, where every social space that had Wi-Fi ended up looking like this. You had people balancing their laptops on the sofa, on their knee on the sofa. You had cables going all over the place. And so we started noticing this and we went to Vitra again and said, 'Why don't we address this? Why don't we design a piece of furniture that's going to be actually the correct height so that you can work properly, so that you can also have someone sitting opposite you in a chair so you're at the same level instead of crouched down, and have a power cable and a surface to work at.'
So we called this Soft Work, and our thesis for the project was that the desk is dead, because we felt that this could be the future of actually the way people work. So here you can see — it's the correct height to work at a table. This gives you a work surface that moves around, that you can move it out of the way when you get up. There's a power socket that you can flip down or flip up when you need power.
We turned it into a whole modular system. So you could have curves and you could have it back to back. You could have areas where you have more privacy. This part of the system works particularly well in airport lounges now. And then you could have it just as a platform for atriums, just as a bench seat, but maybe with a charging point, which you can see here, or a little surface to do a quick piece of work. So this photo really just has a bit of everything all in one, but the idea was it's fully modular so that you could almost create an architectural space within a larger space.
The last project I'm going to talk about is a project which is very, very simple in terms of its visual side but actually very complex in terms of its mechanical side. It's a company called Axor, a German bathroom, shower company. And they asked us to — they've obviously seen —
Our work, and they wanted to do a project with us. So we challenged them and said, what are the biggest problems at the moment in your world, in the bathroom world? And obviously the most important thing was the scarcity of water. The biggest problem we have as a population is the scarcity of water. I was in Mexico City last year and I hadn't realized until I went, but actually certain parts of the central part of the city are without water for up to one or two days of the week every week. Not on special occasions that you plan for it. You have containers because you can't cook on a Tuesday, or you can't wash up, or you can't have a shower. So this is happening now. And things are obviously, with the state of global warming and so on, things are getting worse. And so we thought, well, let's address this idea of the scarcity of water. Now when you have a shower, when you wash your hands after you've been to the bathroom, there's a lot of wasted water and there's also a lot of wasted energy. When you turn on a tap to rinse your hands, the boiler is firing up, burning gas, but you never actually get to the hot water because it's never got to the tap. You're only there for three or four seconds.
So all of these things we took into consideration. So what we see here is a tap with a lever that comes out of the side. So instead of having either a screw thread tap, a conventional tap where you have to use quite a lot of water just to get the flow up to speed, or you have a mixer tap where again — well, the thing about both of those things is that they actually drip. If you don't switch them off properly, you can have a little bit of a waste of water there. This particular mechanism, it's more like a ballpoint pen. It's on or it's off. There's no electrics here. It's purely mechanical. Now the idea of that was obviously that you don't have any wasted water. The reason it looks so simple is that actually the mechanism is hidden underneath the sink here. So we felt that the simplicity of the delivery of the water should also be echoed in the visual look of the range as well. You can control the flow temperature by turning the lever as well.
So that was the tap, but the control for the shower and the bath and so on, we felt that we could also simplify this in the most extreme way. So again, each one of the controls for the bath, the shower, and the hand shower are here. So they're just a little click on and off. Again, no wastage of water. Hotels — this has been most successful really in hotels, because if you have a 500-room hotel and you've got taps dripping all over the place, at the end of the year, that's a huge waste of water. So this, you can't — unless you leave the tap on full blast, which is highly unlikely. So that was the way to address the different switching of the shower, the overhead and the bath. The other thing was to have one unit instead of three different units. So it reduces the amount of time and therefore the cost of installation. Also by using a paddle instead of a dial, it meant that people with reduced mobility — without it looking like that — you can use the palm of your hand or your elbow to turn things on and off.
And then down to the detail of the actual shower head. This is actually the hand shower. How could we also reduce water consumption? So if you look, each one of those black dots is full of tiny, tiny sprays. And what that does is it delivers a very, very fine jet of water. Combined, they give the feeling of a powerful shower, but actually they're using less than half the volume of water. So I'm not going to pretend that it's exactly the same as a sort of New York hotel shower where you almost get blown across the room, but it does deliver a very high quality shower but using less water. So this collection is called Axor 1 and has been out on the market I think for about seven years and it's now their bestselling range. And it's because of all the design thinking that's gone into it. It's not because people fall in love necessarily with the look. Some people would, some people wouldn't. But for commercial spaces, it's become the number one bestseller, particularly because of that design thinking. So that gives you a sort of snapshot of what we've been doing over the last 30 years. And this is, as David mentioned at the beginning, we do have a show at the Triennale in Milan, and this is just a snapshot of one of the areas of the show. And it will sort of summarize, I suppose, what I've shown you. So, thank you very much indeed. I hope that was of interest to you.
