now

I was at the Barber Osgerby talk at The Art Institute this evening. The talk and the admirable work aside I found myself  taking notes of Edward and Jay’s language (do you like how I used their first names like they are my buddies?). I like listening to people talk about design and paying attention to their “design vocabulary”.

some random quotes I scribbled:

“flavor of our studio…”

“…age gracefully…”

“chair is ‘real’ furniture”

“we surround ourselves with images to look at”

“…the quality of an edge…”

“it radiates something”

“we had to map out the recipe for each table”

“…and then, on to the engineering…”

Although I really appreciate their work – especially the “Lanterne Marine” (above) – for what they are, it seems like sometimes it took a little too much effort to figure out and to make exactly what they had in mind. I have to admit that the ridiculousness of the process they went through to make the “iris tables” (below) is what made the tables interesting for me, but it’s still hard to justify the tables’ existence. The tables are made from very precisely machined aluminum pieces which then individually got anodized to get the different colors and then put together carefully to create the full circle.

Could they have been designed in any other way (maybe with a different material or using a different process) and still have the same effect? I might be undermining the tables with this question, and I don’t mean to do that. It’s just something I could not help but think about.