Photos: Carbon Cloud courtesy Bertjan Pot; Kasese Chair by Gerritt Schreurs, courtesy Jongeriuslab; Knotted Chair courtesy Marcel Wanders
Dutch designers are well known for their irreverent and experimental approach to materials and structures. Back in the mid 1990s the Dutch design group Droog was invited to collaborate with the Structures and Materials Lab at the TU Delft on a project called DryTech. They were challenged to utilise advanced material and technical resources of the lab to ‘weave’ new products with great lightness and strength. Out of that collaboration came some of the most significant furniture designs of the decade – using carbon fibre. Hella Jongerius’ Kasese Chair, for example, was an interpretation of an African prayer chair that sought a “new non-technical language for a high tech material”. Marcel Wanders came up with his, now famous, Knotted Chair made of aramid and carbon fibres soaked in epoxy resin that turned structural norms on their head.
Rotterdam-based designer Bertjan Pot started working with carbon fibre in 2002. He produced a number of commercial products including the Carbon Chair in collaboration with Marcel Wanders for Moooi and an entire bedroom installation one-off called Carbon Cloud that was shown in Milan in 2005.
In 2002 another young Dutch design graduate from Eindhoven, Maarten Baas, took a blowtorch to a number of objects and toasted them black giving them a carbon surface. His later collaboration with the gallerist Murray Moss, called Where There's Smoke, in which he torched a range of furniture design classics from Ettore Sottsass to the Campana brothers, burned his name into the design history books.
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Maarten Baas/Moss Smoke Piano. (Photo: Maarten van Houten, courtesy Baas & den Herder BV)
Photos: Burning Zig Zag chair: Bas Princen; Smoke Children's Chair Vintage and Smoke Dining Chair: Maarten van Houten. All courtesy Baas & den Herder BV.
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