DE ARCHITECTS
1/1
S-642
year 2004
material concrete, metal
source title The Furniture Machine: Furniture Since 1990
info Achille Castiglioni regarded Konstantin Grcic as the best designer of the younger generation, and in response Grcic admitted that a 1984 catalogue of Castiglioni’s work inspired his career choice: ‘It’s his fault I became a designer!’? Both are cerebral designers who create furniture and objects that are fit for their purpose, over and above being essays in style or fashion. In 1990 Konstantin Gric graduated from the Royal College of Art and for a time he worked in Jasper Morrison’s studio. This placed him at the centre of the New Functionalist group of designers associated with Morrison, James Irvine and the manufacturers SCP and Cappellini. The following year saw Grcic’s return to Munich to set up on his own. Humble plastic products such as laundry baskets and waste-paper bins for the German manufacturer Authentics opened the mass-market to his designs. Gric developed the Chair One range (2001-4) with Magis in Italy, a company more generally known for its plastic objects and furniture. Chair One was a linear triangulated metal grid, cast in aluminum, that was a development away from the curved geometries of his earlier New Functionalist designs and towards a new aesthetic of crystals and fractals. His Miura stool for Plank in 2005 was even simpler and strikingly sculptural. ‘The beauty of products we are talking about lies in their simplicity. So, the question is rather how to make them more simple than making them more complex. I am critical towards the idea of over-engineering. I would like to think there is a certain appropriateness of means and economy,’.
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year 2004
material concrete, metal
source title The Furniture Machine: Furniture Since 1990
info Achille Castiglioni regarded Konstantin Grcic as the best designer of the younger generation, and in response Grcic admitted that a 1984 catalogue of Castiglioni’s work inspired his career choice: ‘It’s his fault I became a designer!’? Both are cerebral designers who create furniture and objects that are fit for their purpose, over and above being essays in style or fashion. In 1990 Konstantin Gric graduated from the Royal College of Art and for a time he worked in Jasper Morrison’s studio. This placed him at the centre of the New Functionalist group of designers associated with Morrison, James Irvine and the manufacturers SCP and Cappellini. The following year saw Grcic’s return to Munich to set up on his own. Humble plastic products such as laundry baskets and waste-paper bins for the German manufacturer Authentics opened the mass-market to his designs. Gric developed the Chair One range (2001-4) with Magis in Italy, a company more generally known for its plastic objects and furniture. Chair One was a linear triangulated metal grid, cast in aluminum, that was a development away from the curved geometries of his earlier New Functionalist designs and towards a new aesthetic of crystals and fractals. His Miura stool for Plank in 2005 was even simpler and strikingly sculptural. ‘The beauty of products we are talking about lies in their simplicity. So, the question is rather how to make them more simple than making them more complex. I am critical towards the idea of over-engineering. I would like to think there is a certain appropriateness of means and economy,’.
read more
