Max Lipsey’s father is an architect, and his mother is an artist, but it might be Murray Moss who’s most responsible for turning the Eindhoven-based, Aspen, Colorado native on to design. In the early 2000s, Lipsey was attending NYU, studying design in what he calls an “extremely academic” way. On his commute every day from Chinatown through Soho, he’d pass the windows of Moss’s design emporium, which at the time highlighted the work of Dutch provocateurs like Maarten Baas, Hella Jongerius, and Marcel Wanders. “It sort of made me realize there was a place somewhere I could get my hands dirty and make things rather than writing about them,” he says. Lipsey applied and was accepted to the Design Academy Eindhoven — one of the rare Americans who ever attempt it — and by his first project he was hooked: “I made a belt buckle,” he remembers. “I was playing with sandcasting tin and I made a mistake where the sand broke apart and scattered in the mold, leaving tiny pockmarks where the crumbs had landed. When you polished it, it looked really nice, and it helped me learn to keep an eye open for mistakes. You have to play and experiment and you’ll discover things you wouldn’t have been able to imagine before.”
That kind of experimental, let’s-see-what-happens attitude would at first seem a rejection of the precision-based craft of his father’s architecture — except that the project that’s earned Lipsey the most notoriety since graduation is a series of dining chairs, loungers, and stools whose colorful steel frames are based on the manufacturing techniques and elegant geometries of classic racing bikes, which happen to be among the most meticulously crafted objects around. Called Acciaio (Italian for “steel”), the stools employ a metal-joinery technique known as fillet-brazing as well as a tapered profile and optional racing-stripe stickers that all call to mind the kind of vintage ride that Lipsey has long obsessed over. His breakout collection perhaps more reflects an idea he’s been toying with since his graduation project, for which he made a set of branch-shaped coat hooks that looked like trees growing through the wall and into the house. The project was about bringing the outdoors inside, a concept he’s been meditating on lately after so many years abroad. “I really miss being in nature. In Colorado everything you do for fun involves being outside. You don’t exactly feel that connection to wilderness in Holland.”
Thing you love most about Eindhoven: “The people.”
Thing you hate most about it: “The weather.”
Music most played while you work: “It changes depending on the work. When I need to think and concentrate, it’s Goldberg Variations by Bach. When I need to get some energy and to crank out some production, Devo or Talking Heads. If it’s boring work that I need to distract myself from: podcasts.”
First thing you ever made? “I made some fucking brilliant wood and paint compositions at our ‘wood workshop’ in kindergarten.”
In Lipsey’s Acciaio series of chairs and stools, a seat made from a sandwich of perforated aluminum and saddle leather is stretched between tapered rolls of chromosteel, a special steel alloy that’s only available through bicycle suppliers. The chairs debuted this year in Milan at the annual furniture fair and in New York with Sight Unseen’s Noho Design District. They’re now for sale at Matter in New York.
Lipsey, who has a bit of a bike obsession (he took a frame-building class a few years back and continues to fix bikes for his friends in Eindhoven), was originally inspired by this pink-and-white racing frame he had in his living room at the time. “Something about the bright colors and stark geometry worked really nicely in a slightly messy interior and eventually infected my design,” he says.
The colors he ended up using, though, were a bit more Achille, a bit less Barbie. “I keep a folder full of retro car, motorcycle, and bike colors, and they’re mostly from the ’60s and ’70s,” Lipsey says. “I don’t know why the colors they used then were so much stronger.”
A poster from the Milan show. Each color in the Acciaio series is based on a specific favorite classic bike of Lipsey’s and named after its builder: Mint green goes by the name of Edoardo, while a black frame is called Paulo & Italo.
The red frame is named Faliero, after one of the most legendary bicycle frame-builders in all of Italy. “In Milan, I got to visit his son Alberto Masi’s workshop (above), which is tucked into a corner of the now unused Vigorelli Velodrome,” says Lipsey. “Both Masi and his father are among the most respected bicycle frame-builders. During the show in Milan, Alberto came by the opening and saw my chairs. He said little other than ‘Complimenti’ but it’s maybe the most meaningful thing anyone has said about my work.”
What do you collect? “My favorite thing to collect, aside from bicycles, are antique tools. The more worn and obscure, the better. On the left is a pair of clippers someone brought me from a market in Russia; on the right is a wood carving–plane from 1700s, which came from an amazing antique tool shop in Amsterdam. Most of the stuff they carry is from the 1600s or 1700s, and each tool is so exquisite and beautiful — and much more specialized than anything we have today. I have six different kinds of hammers that I’ve never seen before. I like to try and figure out how they were used. They were expensive, so they were made with a lot of care, and they often have the initials of their maker stamped on them. It just speaks of a different world.”
Event that inspired you to be a designer: “My dad was an architect, which was something I admired. But the practical concerns of architecture overwhelmed me, how every detail has a drawing and is considered and has a plan. My parents definitely let me know, though, that design was something I could do. This is the house I grew up in, which my dad designed and built himself over five years. It’s a really funky, late ’70s mountain house but unique in every detail. I especially like the mix of the Western aesthetic with classic design pieces like the Wegner and Magistretti chairs. Very homey, yet still design-y.”
Favorite material to work with: Metal is so cool I find myself going back again and again. When I was a kid making things, metal was the one material I couldn’t really do anything with. When I was older and discovered welding, it was like being a kid all over again. It’s a total mindflip to realize you can play with this material that is so hard and durable.” (Above: Lipsey’s cast-aluminum coat hooks, part of his graduation project at Eindhoven)
Favorite everyday object: “A Brooks bike saddle. It really is a perfect object.”
Favorite design object: “Jean Prouvé’s Cité armchair. It’s super elegant, but also a really nice chair to sit in. I love the way the leather straps emerge from the steel frame. It’s technically functional but still very elegant.”
Piece you wish you’d made: “I really admire Jonah Takagi’s F/K/A table lamp. The stand actually reminded me of the qualities I wanted to use in the Acciaio series: bright colors, open tubes, and I love the way they tubes are joined. I also like the unusual shape of the shade, and the dangling ball is such a friendly touch.”
Last great exhibition you saw: “Infernopolis, which was this Atelier van Lieshout exhibition on an old submarine dock in Rotterdam. It’s this raw industrial space from World War II, and then to see all of his work collected in one space, you really get a sense of his vision.”
Favorite shop: “Sadly, the now defunct hardware shop in Eindhoven, Ijzerhandel De Spijker, which translates literally to ‘Hardware, The Nail.’ It had floor-to-ceiling drawers of stuff, and even though it was tiny, somehow they managed to carry much more than the chain hardware shops. Now it’s gone, and there’s a cheesy bar there with the same name — The Nail. It kind of makes sense but it’s also kind of insulting. I imagine it’s how people in New York felt about the NYU Palladium dorm being built on top of the old nightclub.”
Favorite design ritual: “A very fortunate ritual that I try to repeat every year is breakfast in Milan.”
Place you go to be inspired: “Usually out into the woods, on a bicycle. But the captain of such rides would have to be this bike road I found in Bali. I still can’t believe it was real when I see the photo.”
What do you keep around your studio or home for inspiration? “Very, very random objects and half-models I can’t seem to throw away. In this photo, on the left, that copper wheel is an empty spool for welding wire. Below that is a stainless steel Ikea bowl I use to mix paint in. In the background is a drawing I made in school of floating teapots. There’s also an antique shaving brush, a piece of coral, a piece of blackened steel, a branch and a plaster cast of that same branch, and an Indonesian die. The fingers are tin casts of my own, and in the foreground is a sample from the Acciaio seating, which went through several iterations: I tried wood, fabric straps, mesh, solid aluminum, perforated aluminum, leather without aluminum. The leather and aluminum sandwich ended up being an effective way to control the material so it doesn’t stretch or deform.”
Design or art hero: “My design heroes change all the time, but the art ones are a bit more stable. A longtime favorite is Tom Friedman, for his wild creativity with materials and wry sense of absurdity.” (Above: Friedman’s Untitled (1995) toothpicks)
What inspires your work in general? “Moments that make me feel something that my brain doesn’t know how to process. Like this display of buckets from a Mexican marketplace. I find it really beautiful but for no reason. It makes me smile and feel something, but I can’t explain it. I find that concept fascinating. I take a lot of pictures like this when I travel, but it’s usually after the fact, when I go through pictures, that I realize how inspiring some things actually were.”
As the youngest child of a Parisian architect — with three older brothers working in the same field — Victoria Wilmotte had one thing going for her when she started studying furniture design at London's RCA four years ago. But she also had a few handicaps: she was only 20 years old, she had just been rejected from Paris's ENSCI school, and her professor at RCA, Jurgen Bey, couldn't comprehend her strange working methods. Obsessed with materials and surfaces, she wanted to spend all her time in the workshop, skipping the thinking and brainstorming part and going directly to prototyping. "Jurgen Bey was really into concepts," says Wilmotte, now 24. "He was more about a table telling stories, but I only wanted to talk technically. He basically said, 'I don’t understand you. But continue.'"
Julien Carretero's work invites metaphor the way cheese fries beg to be eaten — make a bench that's perfectly shaped in front and slowly morphs into chaos in back, and suddenly it could be about anything: humans' ultimate lack of control over the universe, politics, the pressure to succeed, mullets. For the Paris-born, Eindhoven-based designer, though, it's mostly just about one thing.
By now we're used to furniture designers making art, artists making furniture, and every possible variation along that spectrum. But in 2009, when three of her friends started the Fashion Clash festival in her hometown of Maastricht, the Netherlands, designer and blogger Matylda Krzykowski was convinced her colleagues outside the fashion industry might have something to contribute. She rounded up 10 furniture, textile, and graphic designers and asked them to modify their work for the catwalk — in most cases having no idea what they would come up with until the final "outfit" was delivered to her door. The first year, artist Tanja Ritterbex donned a glittery pink Barbie dress and asked to be rolled down the catwalk while she waved at the audience like Queen Elizabeth. The second year, a designer-artist couple from London created a massive, wearable Tyvek tote bag and requested it be modeled by an old man. And for the 2011 show, presented last weekend, one of the designers encased her model in a mountainous wooden cake, with only her head poking out at the summit — in other words, nothing you wouldn't expect to see at an actual fashion show. We asked Krzykowski to tell us a little bit more about the project and about five selections from this year's collection which are shown here, alongside the participant's usual work.
