Why have you chosen to collaborate with Dover Street Market?
I did a project with Comme des Garcons and Lacoste about a year ago and it just seemed to be so relaxed and uncorporate that when we were trying to think of places to do this project, it seemed like a good idea to speak to Dover Street Market first.
So it was a project you had in mind for a while?
It’s a project we’ve been doing for a while at Artek and when it came to showing it off, we wanted to get away from the usual trade fair or furniture retail shop to try and recontextualise it. I think that’s what Dover Street Market does particularly well: bring out collaborations on different ideas beyond fashion. And I want to talk about different ideas beyond furniture, so it’s a very good platform here to do that. And plus I like the cakes.
How did you begin to bring together all the chairs?
To understand the project properly it’s important to understand the history of Artek. Artek spans 75 odd years and what’s unique about the company is that it’s made the same furniture in the same factory from the same forest since 1935. So in that sense it’s a unique survivor of the modernist era.
There’s no other factory that exists that was around at the time of the Bauhaus school and is still producing the same range. Another factor is that the majority of early modernist furniture was crafted from tubular steel and black leather – think Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer - it was made in small quantities for extremely rich people and although the intent was that it would eventually be for everyone, from workers right up to the aristocracy, the reality was that very few people really appreciated it till the 1980’s. It was deemed too hard and inhuman.
What Alvar Aalto did in the 1930s was to rework the modernist aesthetic into wood. As a result, partly because Finland was a low cost economy at the time and also because he was able to specify the furniture at his own factories, it became very popular very quickly and was selling in the thousands when some of the more iconic modernist furniture like the Corbusier Chaise sold in miniscule, almost laughable quantities. And because Aalto’s furniture was produced in such large quantities and used everywhere from working men’s clubs to prisons, hospitals and churches it’s been reasonably easy to collect.
In the last six months we’ve been going round collecting them wherever we can, in flea markets, buying sets from schools and in some instances replacing them with new furniture where they need matching sets. The big idea underpinning the whole project is this discussion about sustainability. It’s a tough subject, which people use as a sticking plaster over their operations if you like. What I’ve slowly come to realise with Artek is that it’s an incredibly sound base for actually talking about it. As a designer you sometimes wonder if it’s really legitimate to even design something new rather than thinking of systems of representing things that already exist. I’m interested in the possibility of not-designing, it’s very economical for me too.
Click here to see a handful of the individual vintage pieces and pictures of the installation.
Is that a hint at the direction you’re taking Artek in?
We’ve got three distinctly different strategies. One is to plug the gap in products, filling fifty years of no development at all for Artek. We’re exploring this partly by reintroducing some of the people they should have been working with in the Sixties like Eero Aarnio, who really was the star of Finnish design and other Nordic giants like Nanna Ditzel as well as looking through the archives to find Aalto’s ‘hidden chairs’.
On another level we’re working on sustainability by industrialising a new material, bamboo in this case, which has superior engineering qualities and has until now always been used as a craft material. It’s a superior plant for the 21st century in my view. Then this other plan, which is to see if we can’t take responsibility for the stuff we produce now by guaranteeing that we’ll buy the stuff back later.
The objective with this project is to ask whether furniture actually improves with age. Can we sell it for more than its original value in the future and will people hang onto it for longer if that’s the case? In my view that’s the essence of sustainability. If we can avoid making new as much as possible, then that’s got to be as sustainable as we can possibly get.
But is there a case for the older furniture becomes the less functional it becomes and it turns more into a work of art than a piece of functional design?
Well take these ones here in Dover Street Market, the oldest ones are actually being used in the café, it’s the new ones that we’re keeping pristine. I think that’s living proof that this furniture has been built to last and be used and still last.
Why do you think over age Aalto’s designs are still seen as very functional?
Well they were never created with fashion in mind. I think all too often things are created from a stylistic basis and hence they date very easily. There are two defining features in Artek furniture, one is that it’s stripped down to its barest essentials. It’s probably the simplest wooden furniture you could possibly make so it sits very comfortably in a wide range of environments. You often see it in places like art galleries, where it’s used because it doesn’t fight with the art.
The second thing is the very rational engineered construction of the furniture, where Aalto was trying to find the neatest and simplest possible way of attaching the minimum number of components together to make a surface for sitting on or eating at. They’re made in a very sturdy almost clumsy way, but they’re particularly neutral in the way they look and particularly hard-wearing in the way that they function. So in some of Aalto’s original buildings, in the Paimio Sanitorium for instance, they’re still using the original chairs. There’s something about the longevity of them, which is beyond fashion, and really appeals to me.
Do you apply the same principles to your own work then, do you feel?
You’ll have to tell me in 70 years, I think. What I do like is the fact that the older pieces here in my view look nicer than the identical bits fresh from the factory. If I was to encapsulate it, it’s that these things look better when they’re old and they become more valuable when they’re old and if we could all do that, if I could age very beautifully I’d be a happy man - though obviously we’re talking furniture here.
Tell me about the tagging system – did you have this in mind from the beginning of the project or was it the result of discovering the chairs had very different histories?
I think putting furniture back into circulation, from buying antiques to selling on eBay, is something that happens every day, which is great. But to do this as a corporate project, we had to add at least one extra advantage and so we’ve worked with two huge Finnish companies. One is UPM, the biggest sticky label manufacturer in the world, who’ve developed this RFID technology tagging, used in Supermarkets and Oyster cards, which is an antennae in a chip allowing the individual tagging of an item. The second is Nokia, who have incorporated a reader into their telephones that enables you to identify your chair. The tag gives you a personal web link, whereby you not only get a personal history of your individual chair - where we found it, how old we think it is and so on - but it also allows you to start adding your own story, so ‘I bought it as a gift for this person’. The idea is that the chair over time builds a character and a soul. I think that given we’re increasingly deluged with products, people are interested in stories and what makes their individual item unique from someone else’s. It’s nice to try to understand the journey of the chair from production to where it currently sits and think of it as having a life after you’ve sold it too.
I think it’s a fascinating idea to be able to trace the history and think of the future of your furniture – is it something that might catch on to other companies do you think?
We’re living in the information age aren’t we? What’s happening now is there are all kinds of interesting things we can do between the virtual world and the physical world. Whether it’s this type of tagging or another, I think almost every product will be tagged in some way eventually. Quite a lot of them are without you even knowing already.
Do you feel you’re making a statement with the exhibition?
What’s interesting is for me to try and work in different spaces. And away from spaces where one conventionally expects to see furniture. I think people are getting bored of telephones being in telephone shops, taxidermy being in taxidermy shops and so on. What’s great about Dover Street Market is the unexpected, so I hope this project will appear in lots of different places that you don’t expect it. And of course it’s a selling exhibition, so our objective on that level is to open this up for people who wouldn’t normally be interested or aware of this kind of project.
INFORMATION
Artek Invasion: 2nd Cycle at Dover Street Market runs until 20th November
Click here to read about the exhibition.
- Website
- http://www.tomdixon.net
- Address
- Dover Street Market
17-18 Dover Street
London W1S 4LT
