Paper model of Konstantin Grcic's Krups blender
Clay, paper, foamcore, potato starch: The materials designers use to mock up their products are strange and varied. (We once saw Stephen Burks make a 1:1 chair model from a lattice of neon bendy drinking straws.) The Making of Design: From the First Model to the Final Product offers an inside look at the creation of recent design icons, from the Bouroullecs’ Vegetal chair for Vitra to the Braun Pulsonic. The book is mostly a compendium of articles on process that originally ran in the German design magazine Form, and original interviews with Dieter Rams and Konstantin Grcic round out the offerings. Says editor Gerrit Terstiege: This “look behind the scenes … illustrates the erroneous, errant, and roundabout paths designers took before coming up with shapes that subsequently seem to be so obvious and self-evident. When presented, perfectly lit and brand new in showrooms, displays, and shelves there is not a single trace of the effort that went into their creation. However, any designer familiar with the doubts, and setbacks that go with any creative process, will very much appreciate the work of their colleagues who, on the following pages, grant an insight into their projects.” Here are a few of our favorite revelations:
Dieter Rams, on modeling without computers at Braun: “People often get up to a lot of mischief with computer renderings and they sugarcoat problematic areas wonderfully. I have always loathed renderings and regularly fought against them. My drawings and sketches were generally intuitive to scale and, even if they were really abstract, the team of model builders was able to make them without any problem.”
Konstantin Grcic, who has relied on paper, scissors, scalpel, and adhesive tape to render his most famous works: “I have a strong dislike of foaming models. They just produce dirt, this really fine dust everywhere. I don’t want that in the studio. Removing things is really easy with foam. But then rebuilding it again is awfully complicated, you have to use adhesive again, and it doesn’t dry properly. Or the new element you have stuck on falls off again. Stuff like that is really annoying.”
Max Lamb, on initial experiments with his Nanocrystalline Copper Stool: “My initial intention for utilising the electro-deposition process was to produce a chair in expanded polystyrene. Yet, an early experiment did not display the required material characteristics. The conductive silver solution that I carefully sprayed onto the object has an alcohol base that corrodes styrene. And the polystyrene model was too light and buoyant to be submerged in the electro-deposition tank. Having discounted polystyrene, I discovered a type of modelling wax produced by British Wax that is very rigid at room temperature, yet at temperatures above 40 to 50 degrees becomes easily manipulable by hand. Best of all, the wax can be melted from the copper shell once electro-deposited, and reused for new models.
“I began modeling wax using my bath filled with hot water. My first full sized chair was, from memory, a handmade replica of Gio Ponti’s Superleggera chair of 1957… My wax Superleggera was incredibly difficult to construct, due to the size of my bath. I had to build the chair in seven sections and then join them once out of the bath by heating the joint area locally using a hairdryer. Though I liked the handmade, naïve character of the chair I encountered structural problems. The delicacy of the legs and uprights of the backrest could not support the heavy wax, and very gradually the chair began to slump. This could be disastrous when in the electro-deposition tank.
“So I proceeded to make a four-legged stool in thick sheets of wax, with a pattern of holes for visual lightness and additional rigidity. I rolled out a 15 millimeter-thick sheet of wax in the bath with a rolling pin. With an old apple corer I cut regularly spaced holes into the wax and I created legs using the tap end of the bath as a mold. I ended up with an oblong stool with four gently curving legs, entirely covered in a pattern of circular holes. I carefully removed the structure from the bath and began to carve a chamfer around all of the holes. With over 400 holes this was a time-consuming process. At this stage I realised that to smooth the top surface I had to submerge the entire stool in hot water again. But the water I placed it in was slightly too hot and upon near completion of my laboriously carved wax stool, just one hour prior to delivering it to Morganic Metal for copper encapsulation, the structure melted. My stool was irretrievably slumped at the bottom of my bath. Three hours of sleep and a cup of tea later, I started on the stool again.”
From The Making of Design
