Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec: Vegetal Chair

(adam štěch) The Bouroullec brothers have been longtime collaborators with the Vitra company. This month, the French brothers introduced their Vegetal Chair – the latest fruit of their certainly unique cooperation – at Designers’ Saturday in Langenthal, Switzerland.

The latest contribution of the two Parisian lyricists further develops their refined artistic attitude towards transforming conceptual ideas and forms into design that is accessible to the entire public. Gallery production of unique character, which the Bouroullec brothers create as artfully as industrial design, serves in this case as an inspirational starting point. The two artists have been working in this same way with Vitra for a long time. Thanks to this Swiss company, some designs that were originally intended for galleries were introduced in the form of mass produced goods.

The Vegetal Chair, the design of which was developed over the course of four years, is not a typical example of such attitude. The chair only represents a conceptual approach that was designated for industrial production right from the beginning. In its basic form, the plastic shell does not differ much from some of the works of Philip Starck, like the Mr. Impossible Chair for the Italian Kartell, for example. However, the Vegetal Chair, through its detailed character and the sincere peace it emanates, stands apart from the extreme formalism of Starck.

The Vegetal Chair is composed of irregular ribs that look like the ramification of a tree, or the cell structure of vegetal tissues. The poetry of nature is transformed into a simple industrial, yet enchanting, plastic system. There is also one striking detail that one would certainly not expect in a mass-produced piece of furniture – the irregular overlaying of the individual plastic “branches.” This new chair by Vitra shifts the possibilities of production of plastic goods. In this instance, it takes the form of a container for biological structures. The chair will be officially introduced at the beginning of 2009.

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