YEREL MALZEME KULLANMAMAK ETİK OLMAZ
İsveçli Tasarım Eleştirmeni Ingrid Sommar şöyle diyor: “Birçok Kuzeyli tasarımcı hem uluslararası markalarla hem de iyi tanınmış uluslararası tasarımcılarla işbirliği yaparlar. İsveçli mimar Eero Koivisto her ikisini de layıkıyla yapar. Living Divani, Boffi, Tacchini ve Cappellini gibi İtalyan markalarla çalışırken, bir yandan da Swedese ve OFFECCT gibi İsveç markalarıyla da çalışır, bütün bunların yanında uluslararası anlamda tanınmış James Irvine, Karim Rashid ve Jean-Marie Massaud gibi tasarımcılarla da biraraya gelir.”
Dezinti olarak Claesson Koivisto Rune ile Tasarım ortaklarımız Nordist ve Neotek sayesinde tanıştık. Size bu tasarım ekolü ile ilgili harika bir röportaj sunuyoruz.
Eero Koivisto (EK): I think the concept of individual designers and architects is dated. Today, more and more groups are showing up – for instance, the Bouroullec brothers, the Campana brothers or the Front-group and Broberg and Ridderstråle, here in Sweden. Further back in time, there were more individual names. Both Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright purposely marketed themselves as individual brands, as did Philipe Starck later on. To work together in a small collective definitely is more interesting and has a more contemporary feel to it.
Susanna Kumlien (SK) (LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE Autumn Issue 2008 Volume #7): Almost every clipping about you says you’re minimalists. In today’s paper (I show the article) it says in a headline: “Yesterday IKEA killed minimalism”. Comment?
EK: They say that all the time. Minimalism was originally a label made up by critics to apply to American artists in the 60’s, who all hated being called minimalists. I do like simple things. “Only one idea should prevail”. If anyone wants to put trifles on a table I did or dress one of our sofas in a chintzy textile, I don’t mind, but I am not a decorator. I think we have been very legible and clear in our designs.
As for the villa Wabi, it wasn’t even minimalistic. It was fastidious, fussy. I find there is a connection between simplicity and beauty. There may also be beauty in shapes created by fractional numbers, since you discover new things in them all the time, a beauty that is about structures or systems . . . such as in the leaf of a fern. But I don’t like jumble, it’s cacophonic. And after all, it is placed in a room that must function.
I like to design things that go together with other things. Other designers can do the pieces that put themselves in the middle of a room, declaring “Here I am!” I am more into contexts and shared entries of objects. It’s about combining various parts to create a new whole.
SK: A couple of years ago, you designed a set of tables named DNA. Would you say there is such a thing as the shape of life?
EK: I was inspired by the DNA molecule (he scribbles the various parts of the DNA molecule on a piece of paper and explains their bindings) and the way they variously connect, depending on where you are in the molecule. I am childishly obsessed with systems and the possible combinations or bindings within a system. And those tables can be combined in the same way as the molecule. But I certainly never set out to do “the Design of Life” or anything like that, . . . life is rather something that goes on than something to be configured, molded or shaped. Then again, the shapes of nature are a source of inspiration. For instance I did the ‘Sport’ collection – chairs and tables – inspired by the hexagon shape of a honeycomb cell in a beehive. Round but not round.
I have read that ‘organic shapes’ are now trendy. If you ever hear about something being ‘it’ or ‘in’ for the season, you can be sure that’s not what I am working on. And there is also misperception about organic form. It has been claimed that there are no straight lines in nature, a statement that simply isn’t true, as the honeycomb cell clearly shows. As I said, I am deeply fascinated by systems and structures and I’ve always envied people gifted in mathematics and geometry because I find it so intriguing.
SK: A recent creation is the table series, Amazonas, which is a hundred percent recyclable and from which a certain amount of money goes to Barnens Regnskog (Children’s Rainforest of Sweden). Can you tell us something about what lead you to the idea?
EK: The tables have five legs and two levels and are sold only in sets of three. There are three different shades of green. The idea first came up when I was in New York together with my son, then ten years old, and we were looking at an exhibition of live frogs. The rainforests are their natural habitat, which is now being threatened. The typology of things interests me very much. So making the tables in a mono-material – steel – that can be recycled and then, in its next life, become something else entirely, occurred to me as doing something that hasn’t been done before in the furniture sector.
I do believe that in the future, there will be more recycling, not only by grinding down materials and making new products, but by actually recycling existing objects. Because, in the end, constantly producing new things will be much too costly. And things that prevail are good things. Ecology and green thinking is not only about recycling materials but also about living outside what we call trends.
In every project we work on in various parts of the world, we use local materials. Anything else would be immoral. I also find it absolutely incomprehensible that not all houses built in Sweden today get heating from the ground. The usage of fossil energy is something that will be viewed, in retrospective, as a weird parenthesis in history. I saw an exhibition at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris called ‘Designs for a Better World’. Amongst the exhibited objects was a vessel that could produce water in the desert. I liked that.
SK: You design private villas, fancy offices, diplomatic buildings and gourmet restaurants (such as Operakällaren in Stockholm). Who do you picture as the user of your designs?
EK: As many people as possible! Designing a subway station would be cool. And I would like to design a church. Not that I am religious, but because it would be exciting to work on an emotional structure. When we were doing the Gucci store in Stockholm, we were working on the interior for a McDonald’s restaurant in the same city simultaneously. McDonald’s didn’t mind that we were doing work for Gucci, but Gucci certainly didn’t feel comfortable with us working for McDonald’s. There was even a critic who wrote that I should apologize for it. So I sent him a postcard, saying “We’re sorry, Kind regards, Mårten, Eero, Ola”.
I didn’t hear from him afterwards.
I must say that I like doing things that many people can use. Unfortunately, it isn’t always possible. Many designers are working towards the luxury segment, and I do it too. And I think that then one is morally obliged to push things forward, to develop form and shape and cover new ground. Someone has to do new things first. Or take a concept and place it in a new context . . . as we did with the jewelry ‘Eve’, made out of aluminum sashes. Altering the typology of things is exciting.
SK: Would you agree that design is a compromise between aesthetics and function?
EK: Yes, but there is nothing necessarily negative about a compromise. It’s like a relationship with a person you share your life with. It cannot always be perfect, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a nice compromise (smiles).
SK: Do you like what you’re doing?
EK: I think it would be terrible not to like what you do and I couldn’t imagine getting tired of my job. I like passionate people and often find it more interesting to talk to persons from professions other than my own. At a dinner, I was placed next to this guy who knew absolutely everything about the 30-year war in 17th century Europe. I didn’t know how interesting that was until I spoke to him. He was so spirited. I didn’t have a clue who he was, and he didn’t know who I was either.
There are so many interesting things to see in the world, that I simply don’t know how to find time for it all! When I was in Hong Kong, I visited old Chinese temples. It was interesting to compare them to the Japanese temples I’ve seen before. I find Feng Shui to be basically excessive common sense.
And then there is the whole Arab tradition of shape and form. I would like to see Alhambra, but haven’t had the time yet. I wish there was more time so that I could just travel about and see things.
SK: When there are so many interesting things to see and think about, it seems amazing that you’ve managed to sort out a profession.
EK: Yeah, but that was pure chance. I was a graphic designer interested in moving on to three dimensions, and considered becoming a stage designer. Somewhere along the way I got interested in this stuff. Other people may know about their future profession when they’re six years old. I honestly didn’t have a clue (starts scribbling on paper again). You may say when you are at this point (shows on the paper) that then it started at this other point. But that’s a construction of thought by degrees, a rationalization made afterwards. In real life, you don’t really know. It just happened. If I was a chef, I would be happy with that too.
