I'm republishing today a piece I recently did for another magazine about young furniture designer Rutger de Regt.
Rutger de Regt is not new to the Ventura Lambrate event: the designer graduated last year from the Royal Academy of Art (The Hague), where he studied interior and furniture design, but he was part of the university’s Milanese showcase in 2010.
At the time he presented the concept behind his “Happy Misfits”, seating solutions in bright pop colours that look like elephantine cute monsters, but are actually based on the possibility of manipulating the skin. His furniture collection was still in the concept-stage, but the young designer accompanied it with a fun performance that showed how the key point in his pieces - made with a baloon used as a flexible mold for styrofoam pearls - was the material and the way he constricted, released and sculpted it.
De Regt is back to the 2012 Ventura Lambrate showcase to introduce visitors to more “Happy Misfits” and to a new project, a series of furniture made in recycled plastic.
What’s the main difference between your 2010 presentation and the current showcase at Ventura Lambrate?
Rutger de Regt: In 2010 I presented my concept, but now that I have finished my studies I’ve brought a new series of Happy Misfits that also feature some of the pieces I did as part of my graduation show.
The “Happy Misfits” look like strange but cute monsters, what inspired them?
Rutger de Regt: The concept behind them is taken from bodybuilding and the possibility of manipulating your skin. The basis is a baloon used as a flexible mold for EPS granules, that is styrofoam pearls, but the key is the transformation of the flexible mold into a solid shape after constricting the material in several places. Once the steam is added the density of the pearls increases since the steam polymerizes the granules making them sticky, so you obtain a solid shape.
You’ve also been working on a new series of pieces called “Make & Mold”, what’s the concept behind them instead?
Rutger de Regt: These pieces are still at the prototype stage. They are based on a process of regular recycling, but they derive from a single industrial mold reclaimed and turned into a DIY production process for furniture design. Every piece comes in the same shape, yet at the same time it’s also unique because it depends from the way the plastic melts together.
Where would you like to take your "Happy Misfits" series in future?
Rutger de Regt: We’re living in an exciting period of time, with new technologies such as 3D printing, but I would really like to set up my own production line. Yet I don’t find interesting to pre-design a shape or form, but I prefer being surprised and let the process create shapes that I could have never thought beforehand. I want to find form in the material in the most natural way and the best way to do it is by letting the material do what it wants. The "Happy Misfits” come out the way they are because they are based on this principle and for me the most important point is to keep this technique and the shapes and forms it creates and be therefore a “producing” designer, someone who actually makes things.
So you would like to preserve this hands-on aspect of your work?
Rutger de Regt: Definitely. That may be the difficult part, but I want to control and create in this way, producing my own pieces where I live and escaping the most rigid restrictions imposed by the industrial processes. We don’t know where the future will take our daily lives, but I do think that we should reclaim the craft aspect. Nowadays the production is often outsourced to other countries and then specific products are then reimported in the West as that’s cheaper. I think this will end in the long run as countries will start producing again their own things, realising that so far we haven’t been losing only our crafts, but also the knowledge to actually make them.
Rutger de Regt’s “Happy Misfits” and “Make & Mold” projects are at Ventura Lambrate, Milan, until today.
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