Architecture of Israel - latest issue

DROOG DESIGN

BACK TO BASICS WITH A TWIST

ALEX WARD

Droog Design is widely recognized as one of the most innovative and influential global design initiatives of the the last decade. Inspiring young designers on both sides of the Atlantic, Droog ("dry" in Dutch) constitutes a rebellion against over-design and the personality cults that dominated design in the eighties. The group was born in December 1993, when Renny Ramakers, the editor-in-chief of a design magazine, organized an exhibition of works by a group of young Dutch designers in the Amsterdam jazz club Paradiso. The works looked like "design accidents", yet their impact was immediate and profound. Here was a new, fresh, and radical approach to design, which rejected the rectilinear abstraction of the De Stijl legacy and the ideals of polished style - and form for form's sake - advocating instead the idea that products should be what they are and nothing else (in the spirit of the minimalist dictum "less is more") and remain "style-ess".

Droog Design also related to other values, such as environmentalism, and was in tune with a global "sub-cultural" movement that found visual expression in other fields and places in the world. Droog products - furniture, light fixtures, home and bathroom accessories - are marked by their simplicity and lack of elaboration. Some items are produced in a series, some are made individually by the designer, and some remain at the prototype stage. They are either hand-crafted or manufactured industrially or a mixture of both, and are made of a wide range of materials: paper, cardboard, wood, glass, felt, porcelain, polyurethane, and more. In 1994, Ramakers and designer- educator Gijs Bakker, who together created the Droog Design Foundation, formed a relationship with the Voorburg-based company DMD (Development, Marketing, and Distribution), with the aim of broadening Droog's base and fulfilling commercial demand. To prevent Droog from becoming a mere barometer of the fashionable and trendy in design, they also initiated several experimental projects, among them Dry Tech 1 & 2, together with the Aviation and Space Laboratory at the Delft University of Technology, and a project with the German porcelain company Rosenthal, in which they drew on the latest technological developments to design traditional products.

Dry Tech 1&2

Martin Hoogendijl

Hella Jongerius

Jan Konings and Jurgen Bey

Marcel Wanders

In 1995, Ramakers and Bakker embarked on a joint project with the Aviation and Space Laboratory of the Delft University of Technology. They aimed at experimenting with new materials in a way that would wed high-tech materials with low-tech aesthetics. The most famous result of this project was Marcel Winders' Knotted Chair, a macrame chair combining traditional hand skills with advanced industrial technology. Another remarkable product was Konings and Bey's futuristic "Kokon" furniture, made by "cross-breeding" two or more products. Using a technique borrowed from the aviation industry, the designers covered the frame of their piece with a synthetic fiber that shrinks around the skeleton, forming a smooth elastic skin. Designers associated with Droog believe that ornamentation plays an essential role in the design of a product, beyond serving a secondary function that is added after the basic concept is formed. In Dick van Hoff's felt washbasin, the zigzag stitches function as ornament while revealing how the object was made. Ornament is clearly central to the design concept of Djoke de Jong's Curtain, where the ornament - a dressmaker's pattern for a jacket - can actually serve to make a new, functional object. The relationship between ornament and design concept is more difficult to identify in Hella Jongerius's B-Service, where imperfections are the ornament, endowing the objects with a life and spirit of their own. The direct outcome of the method of manufacture dictates the shape and ornamentation of the Bronto children's chair designed by Richard Hutten. The notion that ornament need not be a static feature is beautifully explored in works by Arnout Visser such as Condensation Bowl and Optic Glass. Nature defines the ornamentation in Neils van Eijk's Cow Chair, which is made out of a single piece of cow skin. Function and ornamentation are inextricably mixed and essentially indistinguishable in Saar Oosterhof's design, where the tablecloth and bowl have been melted together.

"Act Local, Think Global"

At the 1999 Milan Fair, four members of Droog Design - Jurgen Bey, Marti Guixe, Hella Jongerius, and Marcel Wanders - presented a series of products created for the 17th-century castle Oranienbaum, in the eastern part of Germany. The project, "Couleur Locale", aimed at revitalizing the tourist industry and giving a boost to the local economy. A focus of different layers of history and tradition, nature, ecology, and culture, the castle and its grounds constituted a rich tapestry from which to work, and it took Droog Design in a completely new direction. The challenge was to design products tailor made for a specific location, taking into account its unique qualities and needs, while avoiding provincialism (in contrast to today's dominant trend of serving an international market) and remaining internationally relevant; hence the slogan "act local, think global".

Using local materials as much as possible, the designers created such products as benches made out of tree trunks, with backs of traditional chairs found in the Castle, special chairs made by the local basketry maker, and benches made out of fallen leaves and other waste material. As the region is a famous bird sanctuary, they designed bird houses, and appealed to all the visitors' senses with recordings of sounds in the area, special bread and cookies, and products developed for local produce, such as oranges and liqueur. One original idea was a clear boiled orange lolly with a pip inside it. After eating it, one could bury the seed in the ground, mark the place with the lolly-stick, and after waiting a number of years for a new orange tree to grow, make a new lolly out of the old one, and so on - ad infinitum.

While Droog does not reflect the whole picture of product design in the Netherlands, it has been characterized as "a turning point in the history of Dutch design". This exhibition features selected items from the 1993-99 Droog Collection of the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, and traces the different stages in the development of Droog Design, from its inception in a jazz club less than a decade ago to its position at the forefront of the design stage today.