Oscar Wanless and Attua Aparicio certainly aren’t the first design students to have clashed with an industrial manufacturer, showing up the so-called experts by proving a seemingly impossible process quite possible after all. But the RCA grads—who now collaborate as Silo Studio—are certainly the first we’ve heard of whose triumph so impressed said manufacturer that they were asked to move into the factory. At an industrial park 45 minutes outside the center of London, Silo operates out of a small warehouse room on the premises of Jablite, the U.K.’s largest maker of styrofoam insulation panels. “They’ve got steam, which is how we produce what we produce,” explains Wanless, that being lumpy polystyrene furnishings once compared to “stage scenery for a production of Hansel and Gretel on acid.”
The pair’s experiments with the crumbly white stuff began when they were seniors in the RCA’s Design Products course and searching for an obscure or overlooked material to experiment with, one that would set them apart from their peers. “We were also looking for something that had its own language, and that we could make different shapes with very easily,” says Wanless. Styrofoam seemed perfect, except for two problems: It was only sold by the ton, in granular form, and the pressurized steam needed to expand those granules was considered dangerous for amateurs to wield. Company after company rejected Wanless and Aparicio’s pleas for help until someone introduced them to Jablite, and even then, they were strongly advised to follow protocols when working with the stuff — something design students aren’t exactly wont to do.
Ultimately, it was only by flouting standard practices that Wanless and Aparicio were able to develop their proprietary design process, which not only won them their “designers in residence” status at the Jablite factory but has since scored them solo shows and a spot on the shelves at the London design mecca Mint. During the city’s design festival in November, they were kind enough to let us poke around the Silo Studio HQ, where they explained their process in detail, and clued us in to the materials they plan to conquer next.
Examples of finished objects by Silo Studio, in this case a suite of furniture the duo exhibited at last year’s Milan Furniture Fair. Aparicio and Wanless call their proprietary take on styrofoam “NSEPS”—for “Not-So-Expanded-Polystyrene”—for reasons you’ll discover in the following slides.
We first discovered the studio’s work via the London design store Mint, which was one of the first to stock pieces like these coat racks; despite the fact that they look extremely fragile—even in person—and border on misshapen, they’re actually fully functional. (NSEPS is about 10 times stronger than typical polystyrene. “Sure it can break, depending on how hard you hit it with a hammer,” says Wanless.)
The actual Silo studio, where the pair have been working for nearly a year and a half. “When we first started this project in school, Attua and I were good friends looking to do a project together,” recalls Wanless. “We both liked molding, and we both liked wonky sort of stuff. We were looking for a material we could mold that wasn’t really on the radar of other designers. Polystyrene is very-low grade, and it’s been around since 1948, but no one’s really ever done anything with it besides, like, cups or insulating panels.” Adds Aparicio: “Or packaging, because it’s so lightweight.”
The decision to found Silo with their work in polystyrene, though, turned out to be rather impractical: They couldn’t buy the granules used to make it in small enough quantities, and no industrial supplier wanted to help them. “We were calling companies and telling them what we wanted to do and they were all saying, ‘It’s too dangerous!’” Jablite—in whose southeast London factory, above, their studio now resides—was the first company to take a chance on them.
Jablite’s factory floor, where the majority of the U.K.’s insulation panels are made. The panels are placed underneath buildings during the construction process. “They’re very soft and allow for clay heave—which is water swelling in the clay underneath the structure—to come up and not crack the building,” says Wanless. As she walked me through the factory, Aparicio laughed as she recalled their early days in residence there, when the factory workers used to tease her about her unmarried status and how she had the women’s bathroom all to herself.
Typical Jablite panels, whose mottled black-and-white patterning echoes that of most of Silo’s pieces; the mottling comes from the fact that styrofoam is made from small granules that expand—and fuse together—by way of pressurized blasts of 200-degree steam. “We did our first experiments with a kettle,” says Aparicio. “At first we thought, it’s going to explode! But polystyrene doesn’t actually expand that fast. I think it’s less explosive than popcorn.” Even so, Jablite was cautious at first, advising the designers to stick to traditional production methods. “They’re all about volume next door; their goal is to do stuff really quickly,” says Wanless. “They were telling us the way they know.”
The process the duo developed starts here, with the actual colored styrofoam granules, some of which come from Jablite (black, white, orange), and some of which (hot pink, yellow, green) Jablite helps them source from other companies. The fact that styrofoam starts out in granular form is a huge influence on Silo’s final designs. “You get these weird sort of gradients because of the way the granules layer, which is something you can’t do with injection-molded plastic because it’s liquid,” explains Wanless. “So you get this new visual language which you don’t see in much else. Everyone thinks our pieces are printed.”
To make a certain piece, the designers first sew a simple mold from a coated textile—an idea that was crucial to their success, it turns out. Metal molds would have been too expensive. “Because polystyrene expands at 212 degrees, and you can wash clothes at that temperature, we thought to use fabric,” says Aparicio. “It’s so much cheaper to be able to sew your own mold, not to mention faster and easier to change. It’s more like drawing, in a way.” The mold gets packed completely full with granules.
Their biggest departure from typical styrofoam manufacturing, though, was what happens here, inside their homemade oven. To make a long story short, industrial polystyrene is pre-expanded, loaded into molds, and then quickly puffed up into its super-expanded, lightweight form. Silo’s styrofoam is heated only once, but much more slowly, and is puffed up only halfway, so it’s much more dense and durable. The pressure of the granule-packed fabric lends enough pressure to ensure the half-baked granules still stick together.
Colorful buckets underneath the steaming oven. “While we were working on our graduation project at the RCA, we actually brought some pieces back to Jablite to show them, and they didn’t believe it was polystyrene,” says Wanless. “It was so dense, and they couldn’t really see the cell structure. They had to break it in half themselves to understand that it really was polystyrene.” That moment of realization paved the way for the designers-in-residence offer.
Experiments hanging around the studio. In the background is the small plastic-wrapped shed that the designers do their computer work and sewing in—especially during the winter, seeing as the rest of their space is unheated.
The entrance to said shed.
The interior of the shed features two walls completely covered in corkboard, which is where the designers post samples, inspiration objects, sketches, and ephemera. In the upper left-hand corner is a “bird” made from the relic of a mold malfunction. “The beak part is normal, but the bird’s head exploded out of a break in the mold,” Aparicio says. Adds Wanless: “We often have failures with the mold exploding. It’s very lovely when it happens, though—it does something weird where it liquefies because of the pressure and you can see the granules extruding themselves.”
More inspirational doodles. Says Wanless of the Spin-Art and spidery type pieces, “We use high-pressure air to blow the paint around so you get these weird, monstery sort of things. A lot of our pieces, I don’t want to call them animals or people or monsters, but they’re slightly zoomorphic, in a way. And there’s a kind of darkness about them.”
More studio experiments hanging inside the shed…
…some of which literally look like shapeless blobs. Beautiful shapeless blobs, anyway.
An odd little totem nestled among the studio’s more workaday provisions.
A study in contrast: normal polystyrene, at left, which the designers have employed as a pencil holder, versus NSEPS, at right, which no pencil in the world could penetrate. It’s still lightweight, but feels almost like you could crack a tooth on it.
Back outside the shed, in the main part of the studio, is another example of Wanless and Aparicio putting regular old styrofoam — which is obviously a plentiful resource in these parts — to good use: as a massive storage unit for tools and random supplies.
It should be emphasized, though, that Aparicio and Wanless are adamant about not getting pigeonholed as “the styrofoam people,” even though they still believe their investigations into the material still have a lot more potential. They’re both highly curious people, obsessed with making and process, and they’ve used those skills to other ends; this test panel from their recent project for Bloomberg, for instance — which we featured in our roundup of the London Design Festival in November — is another novel material made from old computer keys melted into resin.
They’ve also been molding aluminum in heat-resistant textile molds to produce metal legs and supports for their NSEPS furniture, a hybrid they debuted during LDF in a solo show at Marsden Woo gallery, which we also covered a bit of back in November. Pictured here are two small molded-aluminum test models.
More models we spotted in Silo’s studio, these for actual pieces that ended up in the Marsden Woo show, including a somewhat severe-looking black cocoon lamp that these two lumps of molding clay appear to be standing in for.
Also at Marsden Woo, Wanless and Aparicio unveiled their first experiments with glass, which they’ve been blowing into textile molds — the result of which is that both the aluminum pieces and the glass vessels maintain a similar surface texture to their NSEPS pieces, connecting their overall body of work in a subtle but pleasing way. The only problem is that they can’t do the glass- and metalworks at their actual studio, since the Jablite factory bars hot works for insurance purposes (too many flammable solvents lying around). They’ve had to find a satellite workspace for those projects.
Our favorite recent experiment of Silo’s, though, has to be — what else? — their NSEPS bracelets and necklaces, shown hanging at right in this photo. Will we end up carrying them in the Sight Unseen shop? Stay tuned to find out…
The history of the metalworking technique known as granulation stretches back some 5,000 years, to when ancient goldsmiths in Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean began fusing tiny ornamental gold balls onto jewelry surfaces using a painstaking invisible soldering process. It was used to decorate the rings of the queen of Ur in the Bronze Age, perfected by the Etruscans in the 7th century BC, and resurrected in 1933 by a jewelry maker looking to copy pieces from the British Museum's collection. Yet only when the contemporary Belgian silversmith David Huycke began experimenting with the obscure technique in 1996 did it feel like granulation had finally evolved — beyond the realm of fussy antique jewelry and into the world of modern design. For Re-Thinking Granulation, Huycke's show of granulated vessels and atomic sculptures on view now at the design museum Z33 in Hasselt, Belgium, he's worked on a blown-up scale and forsaken the idea of ornamentation in favor of letting each object's form grow organically from the process used to make it.
The first time we attended the London Design Festival, five years ago now, it became something of a benchmark for us — the design event against which we not only measured other design events, but would come to measure our own, the Noho Design District. That's because when you attend the LDF, you feel like you couldn't be anywhere else but in London; the spotlight is resolutely on emerging homegrown talents (thanks in part to the RCA) and there are always brand new projects and product launches to see (thanks in part to the fact that, unlike ICFF, the festival takes place halfway between Milan fairs). LDF has such a good reputation, in fact, that even the coalition behind New York City's official efforts to organize an as-yet-unnamed New York design week are looking to it for inspiration — can you imagine Tom Dixon giving away 500 free lamps in the middle of Times Square? It may happen sooner than you think. In the meantime, three years after our last trip to our favorite fair, we've returned, and we'll be making the rounds all week reporting on who and what we see here. After arriving on Friday morning, we had a bit of a slow start, poking around Shoreditch and hanging out with the incredibly gifted duo behind Silo Studio, whom we'll introduce in depth in the coming weeks. Check out the images here, and stay tuned for many more.
It's official: Sight Unseen's first printed edition, Paper View, is finally out, and we've held it in our very own hands. Today, we've prepared something special for you in honor of the occasion, a series of outtakes from one of the articles published in Paper View: A catalog of Max Lamb's personal collections, which first ran on Sight Unseen early last year.
