Wallpaper* Design Awards: Formafantasma’s assemble-your-own trophy is a crafty winner

When we were thinking of a way to commemorate this year’s Wallpaper* Design Awards winners, we didn’t have to think far: Formafantasma was the first name to come to mind, for their ability to encapsulate the creative zeitgeist of this moment in design.

Our Designers of the Year in 2021, Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin proved to be the perfect collaborators for this special trophy and instantly took on the challenge we posed them: enthusiastically leaping on the challenge we set them: to create an expressive sculpture made of paper, to be received by this year’s winners in a flat-packed envelope and to be assembled by each honoree independently.

Paper, the designers explains, is often the starting point of their work, as a prorotyping material to test ideas. 'This time, instead of being just the first step in the process, paper become the final object,' explains Trimarchi. 'Something celebratory, joyful and deliberately simple.'

The studio worked from a series of references that included models from past projects such as Ore Streams and Maison Matisse. The designers’ early moodboards included colourful sculptures whose lightness mimics the effortlessness of paper, artworks by Giacomo Balla, and Bruno Munari’s Sculture da Viaggio (travel sculptures) – these revolved around creating an object as simple as it was expressive, using folded flat sheets in a variety of materials, that could be scaled up or down, depending on its final destination or function, and reproduced by anyone.

'There is a kind of magic in seeing a flat sheet of material turning into 3d just through simple cuts and folds,' adds Farresin.

Their contemporary response is an object made of three parts, crafted from Gmund Colors Matt papers in delicious, textured hues, that intuitively slot together to create a microarchitectural celebration that we can’t wait to deliver to our worthy winners.