design-phan

Yesterday afternoon, I stopped by the Design Center at Philadelphia University where Tord Boontje is installing his work for the Lace in Translation exhibit that opens this fall. Boontje is apparently not aware of his celebrity status, as he is an incredibly nice, gentle person. (I don't know why I expect big egos. Ahem.) He patiently answered all my questions and then pulled out his Powerbook G4 to show me his vision for the installation and photos of his assistants working on the installation pieces at his studio outside Lyon, France. Incidentally I noticed that he also sticks Post-It to-do lists around the touchpad of his Mac laptop. Superstar designers: just like us!

Anyway, he spent two days two years ago going through the University's archives of Quaker lace, and that inspired him to go in two different and equally fascinating directions--one could eventually have commercial application and the other is purely art and fantasy. He's spreading out his installation over three rooms at the Design Center: the rooms' themes are black, gold, and white. 

The black room (in progress, above) will have mannequins wearing lace ensembles from Phila U's archives, and the light coming through the floor-to-ceiling windows will filter through sheets of machine-made black lace (on the floor, above). The pièce de resistance in this room is the couch Boontje fashioned from a tough, black cord used on sailboats that he's tatted into a sinewy lace patchwork. It attaches to a boxy silver frame (still in bubblewrap in this photo) for a spiderwebby effect. (This is what we might see a few years down the road in a showroom.)

Here's Tord sitting on/in his creation. It's very comfortable. He says his nine-year-old daughter loves climbing all over the couch and wishes he'd used bouncier string for a trampoline effect. Clever girl--I nominate her to design a Boontje children's line!

In the gold room, Tord is hanging lace headpieces, jewelry, and a dress made from grass and raffia to create a kind of fantasy storyboard about a girl who lives in the forest, comes across a Hollywood magazine, and decides to make some of the garments and accessories she sees in the mag out of the materials at hand. Wait until you see the dress and the video he's going to project onto the rear wall. He took it in the forest that surrounds his studio. It's breathtaking.  

The white room is a "process" room where he'll display the models he made for the couch and other pieces of furniture that weren't realized in life-size. He'll also display small snatches of lace he made using grass (currently in those piles of boxes, above) when he was beginning the thought-process for this installation. The raffia curtain in the photo above is going to hang in the gold room. He brought it in pieces, and students at Phila U helped put it together.