Press Release

Dutch designer Peter Traag and Troika member Sebastien Noel have created a new range of tables for the Italian manufacturer Pallucco, which will be launched during the Milan Furniture fair in April this year. The project will be on display at the Pallucco stand in the new exhibition grounds in Rho-Pero, from the 5 th to the 10 th of April.  

‘Machines sculpting the things’
by Emily Campbell, Head of Architecture and Design at the British Council

In 2005 Italian furniture manufacturer Pallucco engaged the experimental Dutch designer Jurgen Bey to direct a new collection of products to be launched at the 2006 Salone del Mobile. Bey is internationally celebrated as the chief protagonist of a kind of neo-alchemy, transforming archetypes of furnishing and ornament into strangely exaggerated and abstracted new forms. Asked by Pallucco to advise on a strategy for reviving their reputation as innovators, however, Bey recommended a role for himself not as a designer, but as a commissioner or coach to a group of other, younger designers; as their free-speaking advocate to the company.

Bey’s vision for Pallucco was a manufacturer connected to a “family” of designers who would constantly refresh their library of knowledge about where and how designs are generated and executed. He searched for designers who regularly workshop, teach and coach others; whose mind-sharing habits would fill this library and be fulfilled and developed in turn by belonging to this shared initiative. The vision is at once industrial and organic: a machine that breeds; an articulated structure that proliferates knowledge; a laboratory where the elements are not chemical but social and intellectual.

The five designers Bey chose are all concerned with a “softening” of industrial production: by the application or implication of craftsmanship; by causing accidents that thwart the standardised character of industrial production; by presenting to us to a strange and wonderful future-scape that contains memories of things we know. Jaime Hayon’s products – from bathrooms to toys – are infected by his intensely personal style as an illustrator. Bertjan Pot collects and incongruously recomposes beautiful things as furniture; for the Pallucco project he took the fascinating woven “skin” of mountaineering rope and replaced its core with steel tubing to create a frame for a chair. Suzanne Philippson makes furniture that seems to express animate character in explicitly industrial form: her light for Palucco illuminates as you unwrap its skin. Peter Traag and Sebastian Noel are united by a pre-occupation with the extent to which products, even as they come off a production line, might be altered one from the next – what Bey oxymoronically terms “the machines sculpting the things”.

Traag and Noel immerse themselves in mechanized process, but in the name of individuation. They experiment with the conditions and intervene in the process of manufacture; by making their own tools, for example, that seek out the “innate” form of a volume of material rather than pressing it into a pattern that already exists. Their Pallucco table is a result of the – underexploited, in their view – possibilities of industrial anodising. The transparent quality of anodising inks invited them to overlay and compound the layers of ink by dipping the table; dipping it again at a different angle; double-dipping parts but not the whole; dipping it and keeping it in motion to create patterns; rotating it in organised and random sequence between dips. They describe the process as “like water colour: enhanced by the shine of the aluminium and made with giant machines and colour baths containing thousands of litres of dye”.

The final tables are the result of a process rationalised to concede to industry: 45° rotations between 2 or more colour dips, and a 3-part construction that can be accommodated in very long but not very deep baths. Traag and Noel are also working on a chair whose fabric upholstery mutates from one to the next like the table’s anodised surface: both rationalised and differentiated by the machine.

About the designers

Peter Traag

Peter Traag is a furniture designer born in Tegelen in the Netherlands in 1979. He studied 3D Design in Arnhem and Design Products at the Royal College of Art in London, where he now lives and works. Since graduating from the RCA in 2003 he has been working as a product designer creating his own range of experimental furniture, shown in various exhibitions all over the world. His clients now include a.o. Edra, Pallucco and the British Council.

Sebastien Noel

Sebastien Noel, born in 1977, studied at the Ecole Nationale Superieure d'Arts et Metiers in Paris where he earned a Masters Degree in Engineering, before working in Milan as a furniture and product designer for a.o. Atelier Bellini and Antonio Citterio and Partners. He graduated in 2003 from the Royal College of Art in London where he obtained a Masters degree in Design Products. In 2004 he co-founded Troika, a multidisciplinary design practice that engages in work that is at the intersection of art and design. Troika’s clients include Ron Arad Associates, Thames&Hudson and the Science Museum.

Location  

Salone di Mobile Milano – Fiera Milano Rho-Pero
5 – 10 April 2006 – Pad. 8 Stand 27

 Contacts  

For any additional information, please contact:  

Peter Traag
T +32 (0)3 231 14 07
M +32 (0)4 7832 6686

press@petertraag.com
www.petertraag.com

Or

Sebastien Noel
T +44 (0)20 7737 22 44
M +44(0)781 6497503

seb@troika.uk.com
www.troika.uk.com