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The Dutch designer--working the seams between craft and art, past and present--explores the industrialized one-off.
By Jennifer Kabat
July 2002
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Jongerius's textiles for Maharam--Repeat Classic Print (left) and Repeat
Dot Print (right)--have such long repeats (nearly ten feet and six-and-a-half
feet respectively) that no two cut pieces will look the same. The white
screenprinting was inspired by production notes and jacquard cards at the
factory.
Photos: Top, Jason Oddy; Bottom, courtesy Maharam
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In a Swiss mill last spring, Hella Jongerius walked past enormous looms
she described as "the size of four double beds." The noise forced
her to cover her ears, but it was here that she found the inspiration for
two of her new sets of fabrics from Maharam. Amid the mechanized cacophony
and chaos lay the key to a revolution in upholstery fabric as well as furniture
design--no small feat for a few yards of material.
This is how Jongerius works: she finds her muse in industrial processes
and their debris. Sitting in her office in Rotterdam, the designer
leans forward and says, "I love what I find on factory floors--the
waste. I'm like, 'Is this trash?' It's pure gold for me." She fingers
her bobbed brown hair. A tall woman with a broad face, Jongerius is quintessentially
Dutch in her appearance. Her hands are elegant, but her nails are short
and chipped from working with materials and experimenting with manufacturing
techniques.
MoMA's design curator Paola Antonelli pronounces Jongerius "a unique
talent who has no rivals." Aaron Betsky, head of the Netherlands Architecture
Institute, declares, "She's one of the most significant designers
in the world today." Jongerius will have two museum shows next March
(planned separately and on different continents, no less): one in New York
at the Cooper-Hewitt, the other at London's Design Museum. Alice Rawsthorn,
director of the latter, puts Jongerius in the same league as Annie Albers,
Charlotte Perriand, and Eileen Gray.
At this year's Milan furniture fair Ilse Crawford commissioned Jongerius
to create a one-off chandelier for crystal-maker Swarovski. An early
proponent of the designer's work when editor of British Elle
Decoration, Crawford put some Jongerius vases into production while
at the helm of Donna Karan's home collection. She also teaches with
Jongerius at the Design Academy Eindhoven; they both run departments
there. "Hella is the most interesting designer of her
generation," Crawford says. "She's reinventing the domestic
interior. Jongerius is the new Vermeer."
Strong praise for someone not even ten years into her career. Jongerius,
39, went back to school to study design at Eindhoven in her late twenties.
Though she specialized in textiles, the Maharam fabrics are the first
she's ever produced. As soon as she left school, she was snapped up by Droog
Design, which included Jongerius in its revolutionary first show and
continued to show her work until 1999. "She is the most interesting
designer to emerge from Droog," Rawsthorn says, "and the only
one whose reputation is completely independent of the group now." Clearly
Jongerius no longer needs that connection, but is much too Dutch, too restrained,
and too polite to say that in an interview. She now runs her own studio,
JongeriusLab.
Before Christmas the studio was based in a gallery. Currently JongeriusLab
is housed--for at least the next six months--in Rotterdam's former Turkish
Embassy. A rundown building with a magical air, its ballroom has exposed
rafters and a lone disco ball hanging where an elegant chandelier once did.
Grand staircases with cracked marble tiles wind their way up the two stories,
and mirrored walls make the whole place seem like an enchanted squat or
a kid's ideal playhouse. Jongerius has to run between offices spread
across different floors, with a workshop on the top. She's in constant
motion. "Now me and my assistants don't need to go to the gym,"
she jokes, jogging up the stairs.
Sitting in her ground-floor office, whose windows are painted
with a border of exotic birds, Jongerius points to swatches of her Maharam
fabric pinned to the wall. "The mill was great," she says. "When
I visit a factory I'm always amazed with new machines and processes. It's
where I find my inspiration." On that first trip she didn't
find her gold on the floor, in the production mistakes and castoffs,
but in the machines themselves. Amid the crashing noise of the giant looms,
she discovered jacquard cards. Like the IBM punch cards that programmed
the old mainframe computers, they tell the machines what to weave.
"It's the sort of thing I would overlook," says Maharam's vice
president of design, Mary Murphy. She recruited Jongerius to work with the
company and accompanied her to the mill. "I spend so much time in mills,
I'm used to seeing raw samples, and looking at things with writing all over
them and ignoring them, but that's what she celebrates. Hella can just see
differently because she comes from the outside."
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Repeat Dot.
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Repeat Classic (left), Repeat Classic Print (right).
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Repeat Classic Print.
Photos: Courtesy Maharam
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Indeed when Jongerius saw the card, she thought, "Yeah, that's it,
use the data from the mills." The holes punched into the cardboard
became the inspiration for her Dot pattern, the first of two fabric
sets. On it, the perforations are translated and woven into dots and circles,
some just an outline, others pixellated. One section of dots is so tiny
that they look as if they're a necktie pattern. To make the links to the
cards' perforations even clearer, some of the bolts will be screen-printed
in white with the cards' actual patterns running across one edge of the
textile.
Jongerius was also let loose in the mill's design archives. "Hella's
eyes just grew wider and wider," Murphy says. "She had this glazed-over
look. The designers kept bringing out more and more fabric. They hauled
out these big books with swatches glued into them, different patterns that
the mill's woven over the years."
"I was like a kid in a candy store," Jongerius says, laughing.
"Mary and the designers at the mill said, 'We're going to show you
a lot of fabric, and you can choose whatever you want and take it home.'
I loved everything. They'd show me something, and I'd say, yes, and
they'd snip off a piece for me. Then they'd come back with another pattern,
explain that it was special because of this and that. In the end, I left
with hundreds of samples." She finally distilled them down to
just a few patterns she used as references for her second textile, the Classic
design. Made of bands of traditional motifs, it has stripes and an oversize
houndstooth check plus a thin line of pheasants flying across it. None
of the bands in either the Dot or Classic fabrics are the same size and
span from two to three meters before repeating, an unheard-of length in
traditional upholstery.
When Jongerius went to the factory, the only firm idea she had was
that she wanted to "make an upholstery fabric where if you have ten
chairs, you don't see a repeat in every chair, so they look related to each
other but not the same." She used the upholstery to turn every piece
of furniture that will ever be covered in it into a Hella Jongerius. By
weaving with different-size swaths and strips of patterns in each warp,
she makes it impossible for anyone using the fabric to create a sense of
uniformity or perfection. Jongerius has designed in manufactured customization.
"The whole point is," she says, kicking off her shoes so she won't
damage the bolt of Dot fabric she's just rolled out as she walks over it,
"you don't see the repeats, so you have an industrial product that
looks like it's been woven specially for you." Murphy explains, "It's
a totally revolutionary way to look at textiles, one that really challenges
how the furniture industry uses fabrics."
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