Atelier NL’s Nadine Sterk and Lonny van Ryswyck keep a studio in the airy loft of a ’70s-style church in Eindhoven. They live there, too, but you wouldn’t exactly say that’s where they work. More often than not, the designers can be found doing fieldwork, whether that means scouring the area’s secondhand shops for mechanical knickknacks to inspire their more analog designs — like van Ryswyck’s hand-cranked radio — or digging up clay in the Noordoostpolder, an area of reclaimed farmland north of Amsterdam that until the 1940s was submerged under a shallow inlet of the North Sea.
Sterk and van Ryswyck graduated in 2006 from the Design Academy Eindhoven, which is where they learned the research-led approach that’s turned them into something closer to anthropologists. Their projects, says Sterk, all stem from “wanting to understand how things work and where they come from.” The best known of these is a series called Drawn From Clay, which was nominated for this year’s Rotterdam Design Prize: It’s an extension of van Ryswyck’s graduation project of the same name, for which the designer gathered soil from plots around The Netherlands to create ceramic cups in different hues and textures. The project has its roots in an internship the two undertook during their studies; in the poorer regions of Brazil, they witnessed ceramic workers with limited resources making clay from soil harvested in the favela. When they proposed returning to South America for their thesis, it took their tutor, designer Dick Van Hoff, to remind them they could initiate a similar project in their own backyard. “It’s like we’d forgotten that ceramics are made from clay and clay comes from the ground,” says Sterk. “It seems like a product that comes direct from the factory.”
After graduation, Atelier NL was invited by Rotterdam-based design couple Rianne Makkink and Jurgen Bey to take up residence at their farm in the Noordoostpolder, where they embarked on a yearlong study of the local farmland and culture. With the help of the farmers, they gathered soil from each plot on the polder — light, sandy clay from the coast where bulbs and onions are grown, darker colors from the area where carrots and tubers thrive, and tough red clay as old as the ice age, gathered from the forest floor. They used the clays first to form a soil map of the area and create a roughly finished tableware series called Polderceramics, and then they produced a dinner service in collaboration with the Dutch porcelain manufacturer Royal Tichelaar Makkum.
Sterk says inspiration for many of the pair’s projects comes from simply being aware of the beauty in the things that surround them. We asked Atelier NL to photograph some of the items they keep around their studio as reminders of that philosophy.
Another “analog thing” the two keep around for inspiration, this hand-cranked music box came with papers and a small tool for punching out original melodies. “I like this because it’s not static,” says Sterk. “You have to perform an action for something to happen.” It’s the same idea that informed van Ryswyck’s 2006 Transceiver, a bronze radio that works only as it’s being cranked. “The user becomes the antenna,” explains Sterk. “Your skin has to touch the bronze in order to receive a signal.”
“When we first started the Drawn From Clay project, we wanted to stamp the outside of the cups with the names of the places where we’d found the clay,” says Sterk. “We got these metal printing letters from a guy who used to make books, and in exchange we gave him a cup. Now we’re constantly looking for new ways to use them.”
This vintage mechanical birdhouse bank from Germany was given to van Ryswyck as a present. “You put the coin on the ledge, crank it, and a bird pops out and grabs it in his beak,” explains Sterk. A simple product, but vastly more rewarding than tossing spare change into a ceramic pig, Sterk says. “It gives you more value. Every day you want to give the bird a coin.”
Deformed prototypes from the Drawn From Clay series. “Experiments that fail are so interesting because you discover new possibilities,” says Sterk. In this instance, two clays were mixed by accident — one that becomes liquid when fired at a high temperature, and another that turns purple when heated. The latter kept the pieces from disintegrating entirely, and the resulting greenish hue sparked the pair’s interest. “We wondered what would happened if we mixed other clays, and some of the experiments resulted in the most beautiful unexpected colors and strange shapes,” says Sterk.
Though Sterk admits to being the one with more technical know-how, she explains that much of her inspiration comes from nature and from time spent in the garden of their live/work space at the 4Apostelen church. “I don’t know what this is exactly, a flower or a fruit, but I am fascinated by its shape. You can learn so much from natural structures.”
“It’s all about being aware of your surroundings,” says Sterk. “I found this leaf in the parking lot outside the church, and I should have photographed the parking lot because the whole thing had turned completely yellow. In autumn, the whole world is suddenly yellow and orange. It’s soon ruined by cars and rain and cleaners, but nature really can change everything at certain times of year. I think sometimes we forget to notice the difference.”
Sterk’s Sleeping Beauty lamp uses light energy to power its 200 knitting needles.
Von Ryswyck’s Transceiver radio
Sterk bought this tiny bundle of chew sticks last year from an Indian street vendor in Dubai, and she was awed by the care and attention that went into its packaging. “You could buy 10 stacks like this for a euro,” she says. “It was cheap, but so nicely presented — tied together with a piece of thread — that it looked really valuable. That same day, I was in a shopping mall where they had this South American root for lighting incense. It was much more expensive for the same amount of wood, and it came in a plastic bag.”
“The language of these old mechanical instruments is so beautiful,” says Sterk of this vintage date stamp. “There’s no battery or chip. You can see exactly what’s happening.” It’s that transparency Sterk sought to reproduce in her graduation project Sleeping Beauty, a hanging light whose metal chassis is ringed with 200 needles that slowly knit its own lampshade.
The scientific process behind many of life’s workaday phenomena is something called capillary action, which is the molecular attraction that makes liquid flow through a porous medium, for those in need of a high-school refresher. It’s what makes tears flow through your lachrymal ducts, what gives micro-fiber its super-absorbent properties, and why groundwater naturally spreads into areas of dry soil. It’s also what powers the Ink Calendar by Oscar Diaz.
The first thing people marvel at when they see the furniture of the young duo Sebastian Herkner and Reinhard Dienes is its industrial, institutional cool — bare wood against metal against richly colored glass, in shapes evoking old spotlights and torches and desk chairs. The second thing is how these hip, talented designers — whose first collection this year caught the eye of Wallpaper, DAMn, and Monocle — landed in Frankfurt, a middling city of 650,000 without a glimmer of Berlin’s cachet.
For more than three years, the Argentinean sisters Sol Caramilloni Iriarte and Carolina Lopez Gordillo Iriarte kept a design studio on the second floor of a building in Barcelona, handcrafting an eponymous line of leather bags in relative privacy. Sol, 32, was working part-time as a set designer for films; Carolina, 25, had just finished a year apprenticing under her friend Muñoz Vrandecic, the Spanish couture shoemaker. Called Iriarte Iriarte, it was a modest operation. Then in June, fate intervened.
