The intriguing work of Peter Bauhuis a German jewellery design-maker was featured at Melbourne’s Gallery Funaki in 1996. One of his remarkable pieces was a seemingly elaborate gold ring topped with a shard of crystal. Staring down through this tiny window, the heart of the valuable object could be seen. It was a piece of detritus. A blue plastic ring like the ones that snap off the spoon that comes with a small paper bag of sherbet powder – the ultimate worthless freeby. On closer inspection the gold wasn’t elaborately worked either, it was a mostly random accretion of metal in drips and gobbets. This design remained in my imagination because of its playful approach to the idea of jewellery as an object of value, for its reference to the childhood veneration of simple objects that serendipitously come our way and because coating was the fundamental aspect of its construction.
In 1997 Dutch designer Jurgen Bey began combining pieces of classic mass-produced furniture and coating them with a tight plastic skin. Called the Kokon (cocoon) series (see image above), it comprised two or more pieces enveloped in PVC using the ‘spiderweb’ technique used in aircraft construction to cover open parts. His approach to design inverts the early 20th century concept of ‘typenmobel’, the ideal of developing furniture archetypes - the ‘chair to end all chairs’, that would make obsolescence obsolete. Bey reworks stylistically redundant objects sending them spinning back to the realm of the imagination. It is simultaneously a Surrealist-influenced collage of two or more objects to create a new and unsettling third, and a fertile way of approaching design for sustainability.
When Bey needed lighting to help display examples of the series at the Milan Furniture Fair he developed a related solution with his Lamp Shade Shade. This design is a tube of two-way mirror foil that fits over existing lamps and shades that still function, but have been rejected for their outdated aesthetic of say ‘70s cool. Or it’s because they represent something with which the user no longer identifies, such as the bourgeois luxury of a modest-sized brass and crystal chandelier. When the lamp is not in use the reflective outer tube is seen, but when the lamp is turned on the old lamp appears, like the plastic ring in its gold casing - as the heart of the new design.
Both of Bey’s strategies ‘re-code’ tired or daggy objects that might otherwise end up as hard waste, by applying a cover or skin. While it is contrary to the modernist maxim of truth to materials and seems problematic since it introduces new materials and manufacturing to serve a need that is already met, it does address the reality of consumer sentiment and encourages re-use and recycling. It suggests a Cinderella system for mopping up excess production, for transforming the banal and useful into the engaging and desirable, or a new kind of service. In the ‘70s people queued with their old furniture to have it stripped of varnish and paint by neighbourhood restorers, today they might engage in an active process of re-coding their material waste by selecting a new ‘skin’.
Jurgen Bey’s designs are distinguished from the antiqued horrors of the craft segment in lifestyle TV programs by their aesthetic and their irony. The bilious green Kokon Double Chair (1999) for example, suggests intimate parts of a monstrous artificial body. The evocation of other worlds, other realities, rather than just other times and styles in the case of the Kokon series and the poetic recuperation of the unloved lamp that can shine once again, in the case of the Lamp Shade Shade, provide us with food for thought about taste, waste and the objects we live with. They summon up endless possibilities for re-working the dull and worthy of our material world using new surfaces and coatings to both conceal and reveal, to give familiar objects new life. In the face of our remorseless tendency to discard, Bey’s designs challenge us to use our imagination and to value objects that have served us well.
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