Maison & Objet 2015: A return to the heart of creation

It’s a special year for Maison & Objet Paris, its 20th year of providing divine inspiration to the world’s leading interior and product designers, artisans, manufacturers and retailers from the diverse world of décor and design.

To celebrate this milestone, the beloved Parisian salon is concentrating on a theme that gets down to the basics of what the industry is all about: “Make,” a word that brings us back to the art of manufacturing and crafting techniques; in other words, to the heart of creation itself.

There is a need to restore value to manufactured goods by appreciating the essential beauty of craftsmanship and perfecting materials. This can be done by summoning nature and playing with its laws to catalyze the supernatural. It can be done using the human hand as a tool for a new luxury, transforming materials into rare, exquisite objects. Or it can be done with the help of new technology used for contemporary comfort and a heightened relationship to the world, strengthening our well-being and autonomy.

NATURE MADE BY FRANÇOIS BERNARD

 To restore value to the things we create, Bernard feels we should just let nature take its course. “This may sound a little mysterious,” he says, but it’s actually the designer acting as a kind of “scenographer” who defines the necessary conditions for an object to come about and lets nature create the object itself.

The Dutch designer Eric Klarenbeek, for example, uses 3-D printing to produce furniture using an organic material (mycelium, a network of fungi) on which mushrooms, plants and other living elements will grow. Instead of using plastics, Eric piles up local land waste like straw then uses mycelium as a living glue for binding it all together. The composite is then grown and dried while simultaneously printing the infill and outer shell, which prevents it from falling apart. The result is a structural, stable and renewable material. Not to mention a most unusual piece of furniture.

Wim Noorduin is a Harvard scientist who creates lovely blooms and floral arrangements by manipulating chemicals in a beaker of fluid, controlling the growth behavior of crystals to create precisely tailored forms.

“For at least 200 years, people have been intrigued by how complex shapes could have evolved in nature. This work helps to demonstrate what’s possible just through environmental, chemical changes,” explains Noorduin.

The chemical reactions that are created dictate the resulting structures, from radiating leaves to stems and petals. Chemical gradients, after all, also influence growth in nature: Marine shells are formed from the reaction of calcium carbonate underwater; bacteria living in colonies can sense and react to chemicals from one another, causing them to grow into geometric patterns.

With nature-made objects, serendipity plays a large part in the creation, yielding unique, singular designs. “The idea is also to incorporate an element of magic, steering away from the idea of serial production, cloning, uniformity, which isn’t too appealing to us anymore,” says Bernard. “What we want is uniqueness, bespoke, singularity.”

HUMAN MADE BY ELIZABETH LERICHE

The past seasons have seen a growing clamor for craftsmanship with the imprint of the human hand so this may seem like nothing new but what’s exciting today is that young designers are appropriating ancient techniques and savoir-faire to design peculiar objects that were never created before.

They are also immersing themselves in the materials that they’re working with. “The more we move towards dematerialization, the more we need to anchor ourselves in the material,” according to Leriche, who says she has always been sensitive to nature, “to the power of wood, of branches.”

One of the upcoming designers featured is the British furniture maker Sebastian Cox. Cox loves the woodlands so much in his native Lincolnshire that he contributes to its preservation by producing furniture using coppiced wood which he collects from the forest. Coppicing is a traditional method of woodland management where young tree stems are repeatedly cut down to near ground level, encouraging new shoots to emerge.

These waste cuttings are what Cox uses to create award-winning, finely crafted pieces that are both beautiful and sustainable. “We design and make objects using a precise, contemporary take on traditional skills and ancient crafts,” says Cox “We’re inspired by the beauty of our material to make simple things, with integrity, that people will treasure forever.”

Turning wood into scales that line the doors of his sideboards and armoires “combine the strength of nature and the frailty of the material itself for a very poetic result,” according to Leriche, who can’t stress enough that poetry is something we need in our lives which can often be dull and stern. We need objects that bring some meaning. “These objects, through their uniqueness, provide us meaning and emotion.”

Leriche invited ateliers like Totus Copenhagen ceramics to set up workshops and illustrate the design and creation process. The act of turning, with the hands caressing the clay, is something she finds very sensual, with an element of fragility as well as strength: “I wanted to highlight this relation between hand and material as in the end when we want to appropriate the object, we want to touch it, manipulate it.”

Another craft featured was tapestry weaving, a field which is currently making a comeback. One of the designers worked with sheep wool, looking raw as if it was coming straight off the sheep’s back, forming the bottom of the tapestry. Towards the top, the weaving becomes thinner and more meticulous. This embodies the metamorphosis of material which Leriche wanted to highlight: “Through creation, through craftsmanship, raw material becomes something superb. Today I think there is a need to be enthralled by beautiful objects. Beauty helps us elevate ourselves. “

TECHNO MADE BY VINCENT GREGOIRE FOR NELLYRODI

“Could the designer of tomorrow be hiding under an engineer’s coat?” asks Vincent Gregoire. Although we can make many things by hand, he feels that there are many new machines like 3-D printers and other “new assistants” that provide an amazing level of creativity and freedom.

“I am also interested in the new powers vested in the hands of the consumer who more and more assumes the role of designer, decorator, stylist, with the help of these new machines,” say Gregoire.

In-flexions, for example, develops a lot of interactive digital applications to produce objects like the Ki-light series of pendant lamps generated by body movements and colors. Through 3-D and color scanning of the body, you can create your own version of a lamp. By changing body positions, the shape is freely transformed until the desired design is achieved.

For Vase#44, on the other hand, it’s the human voice that produces the shape of the object. The more you speak at length, the taller the vase becomes. The louder the voice, the wider it gets.

Another revolution in the home environment is the production of objects that will let us do things or will perform them for us –- these “connected objects” that provide us with free time to do other things, and probably more creative things. Take the MYO armband that allows you to use the electrical activity in your muscles to wirelessly control your computer, phone and other digital technologies. A wave of your hand or a flick of your wrist can seamlessly control music on your smartphone or change images in a video screen presentation. Armin Van Buuren, renowned trance music producer and DJ, uses it at concerts to control his music, lights and visuals. His expressive arm movements sync the music to the stage effects and overall ambience on stage.

NAO, a 58-cm tall humanoid robot is intended to be a friendly companion around the house, recognizing you, hearing you and even talking to you. Their website claims that NAO is constantly evolving to “amuse, understand and love you; in short, to one day become your friend.” Sounds like it already belongs to bizarre science fiction territory? It is no doubt controversial and has resulted in the demonization of this new generation of assistants and machines because of a fear of dehumanized robots or “creepy implementations in third world countries.” But they actually open up possibilities, both technical and creative that are incredible, according to Gregoire. What’s even more magical and amazing is that these machines which are usually hand-controlled, can also be voice-controlled, breath-controlled or by shouting, by heat or the blink of an eye. “It sparks an incredible amount of energy in people.” One observation, though, is that it questions the established position of the designer since anyone can bring a digital file or an idea to a fabrication laboratory and bring to life his desires and imagination. “It kind of restores the balance of power in the realm of creation and challenges the star system in this domain.”