| About | |
| Peter
Traag is a furniture designer born in Tegelen in the Netherlands
in 1979. He studied 3D Design in
Arnhem and Design Products at the Royal College of Art in London. Since
graduating from the RCA in 2003, he has worked for Mike Smith Studio,
making artists’ installations,
as well as on an evolving series of his own designs. Traag is fascinated by mass-production and how it might be thwarted to make products less ‘generic’; the things he makes are governed almost entirely by his desire to challenge and unpick furniture manufacturing processes. His sponge chair, now manufactured by Edra, constitutes an exploratory essay on upholstery: why should it be built outwards from a rigid inner frame? What happens if you form the chair by sucking an upholstery skin too large for the unstable volume of material within until it fits? What happens, of course, is that you get infinitely varied crumples of fabric and compressions of foam and lots of different chairs out of a single mould and process. Technological
developments from the software used by designers to automated prototyping
and
manufacturing processes made it possible
for designers to be virtually removed from making. Traag’s position
is paradoxical: he positively immerses himself in mechanized processes,
but in the name of individuation. By experimenting with the conditions
of manufacture and intervening in processes, by making his own tools
and moulds, he is almost seeking out the innate form of a volume of
material rather than pressing it into a pattern that exists. |
|
| Emily Campbell, British Council | |