During Milan Design Week Kvadrat is going to present an armchair that will make many Adventure Time fans dream about floating in the cloud-like land of the Lumpy Space. Yet the armchair in question was inspired by a real landscape - the Painted Desert in Arizona - and was created through a painstakingly long process by Richard Hutten, well-known for his pieces suspended between art and design.
Hutten stacked over 500 layers of carefully selected and colourful Divina fabrics to create the chair. Each layer was drawn separately and cut one by one with a CNC machine. The result is a the Layers Cloud Chair, a unique handmade piece that will be showcased at Kvadrat’s exhibition "Divina. Every colour is divine", launching in April during Milan Design Week.
Is this the first time you make a piece using the textile not as the cover, but as the main "protagonist" of the piece?
Richard Hutten: Yes, that was the whole concept - to use it as the construction material rather than as the surface or the cover, I wanted to build something with this material as I never did it before. As you may guess, it is not an economic piece and it's not suitable for mass production, but it's more like a one of a kind piece. It's also quite heavy, and bizarre as well, since it's roughly 250 Kg of solid wool.
For this piece you employed Divina fabric, what kind of characteristics has it got?
Richard Hutten: It's a little bit like felt and it's very soft and tactile, when you see it you really want to touch it!
It is fascinating to know that each layer was drawn separately and cut one by one, can you tell us more behind the actual process to make the piece?
Richard Hutten: I can tell you that we spent more hours on it than on chairs destined to be mass produced, because, while the idea was simple and very straightforward, the process of making it and the execution were really complex aspects. We had to draw each layer separately and, to obtain the final shape, we also had to make sure that each layer was a different size. Besides, each colour was different because we wanted to get a nice gradient. The layers were cut on a CNC machine and sometimes it wasn't working and we had to sort out the problems, so it was a long process and it took us one and a half month of manual production to build one chair.
Which was the most challenging aspect of making the Layers Clouds Chair?
Richard Hutten: Every detail was pretty difficult and you could call it a chair of numbers: we employed 840 square metres of material, 545 layers of fabric, roughly 100 colours, and 400 hours of drawing and engineering. Every aspect was important, every detail had to work perfectly. At times it was a nightmare, and we really had to fight to obtain the final piece, but we got there eventually and it was totally worth the fight!
The colours are also very beautiful - how did you come up with this inspiration, the Painted Desert?
Richard Hutten: The Painted Desert is currently on my wish list of places to go. It was really a tough process to find the proper colours for the chair to make it look visually striking. The Divina material comes in 120 colours and we used almost 100, in 1,000 colour combinations. Like I said this is genuinely a chair of numbers!
Will you be presenting any other products during Milan Design Week or will you be involved in any other events?
Richard Hutten: We have a few events and presentations lined up: for Dutch Originals we did a series of side tables; then there's an exhibition at the Museo Poldi Pezzoli entitled "The Soft House" and we're showing our carpets there, plus a miniature exhibition about Dutch chair design from the past century where there are a dozen of my chairs as well. We're also launching a new chair for Artifort. A while back I did for them the "Apps" sofas inspired by the icons on a smartphone screen and now we're doing a chair called "Halo". It's a metal chair, so it's the complete opposite of the Layers Cloud Chair, even though we used the circle as the main theme also in this case.
You're also one of the finalists of the Rijksstudio Award at the Rijksmuseum with your project "Playing with Tradition", can you tell us more about it?
Richard Hutten: Normally, I don't participate in awards, but the museum director is a good friend of mine and invited me to join in. The dish I designed for them moves from the same concept of the "Playing with Tradition" rugs. I was already working on a similar project for the prestigious pottery company Royal Delft that makes all the famous Dutch blue porcelain pieces, so I decided to apply this concept to a dish from the Meissener porcelain manufacture in their art collection. Maybe I will win, maybe I won't, but Rijksstudio remains a genuinely interesting project. The idea to make the artworks at the Rijksmuseum accessible to everybody is super, it's a big source of inspiration for many artists and designers, so that's really good!
The Layers Cloud Chair by Richard Hutten for Kvadrat will be showcased during the "Divina: every color is divine" event at Arcade, Via San Gregorio 43 / Via Casati 32, 2014 Milan, from 8th April 2014. Richard Hutten's pieces will be on display during Milan Design Week at the following events/locations: Artifort, Fiera Milano, Salone Internazionale del Mobile, Hall 16/ Stand F30; The Soft House, Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Via Manzoni 12; Dutch Originals, Cream Lab, Via Savona 53; Concern, Supermodels, Via Giovanni Ventura 5, Lambrate.
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