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This vase from the Prince and Princess series (2000; above), which is
reminiscent of fourteenth and fifteenth century Chinese pottery,
features a pattern of perforations filled air-tight with red silicon
rubber. The plates for the B-set dinner service (1998; below) are baked
at extremely high temperatures until they warp.
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Photos: Courtesy Hella Jongerius
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Jongerius mines the seams between craft, design, and art. When she sets
out to create something, she explores what that object means, considering
its heritage and archetypes. This information gives whatever Jongerius touches
a layered feel, where history and technology, past and present, high and
low rub up against one another. "She uses history not for references,
the way the postmodernists did, but for the raw materials out of which she
makes her work," Betsky says. "She doesn't treat it with deference,
but as a particularly Dutch cultural legacy."
Jongerius also manipulates production techniques to create industrialized
one-offs. "Future craft," Crawford calls it, adding: "Hella's
not heavy-handed in her thinking. It's not some middle-class joke, like
William Morris. She thinks about how to translate craft values to a machine-made
object without making it hokey or folksy."
You can see this--feel it in fact--in Jongerius's B-set dishes, which celebrate
deformity. Pick them up, eat off them; it's almost shocking to use them.
The dishes seem so fragile and precious that they make the simple lunch--just
salad, bread, and cheese--with Hella and her assistant feel special. When
she designed them, Jongerius was thinking of those dishes you inherit from
Grandma, a bit chipped and worn--no longer perfect but infused with love
and meaning. She took her serially produced china and fired it in an
oven so hot the dishes warped, making each unique. She stamped them with
the "recipe," as she calls it, for the glaze and porcelain, so
their heritage is made manifest.
When making a vase--and she's designed many--Jongerius turns to classic
examples for inspiration. Her 7 Pots/3 Centuries/2 Materials series started
with shards from a museum. She built new pots from the pieces and painted
them. Cappellini distributed two vases in 1998, cast with the seams visible
to show where the pieces are joined together. Then they were sprayed with
car paint, her riff on glazing. Jongerius's Groove and Long Neck bottles,
based on traditional shapes and materials, force porcelain and glass to
meld together--a physical impossibility, so she taped them together with
red packing tape, bearing the legend "Handle with care." The tape,
car paint, and seams gave Jongerius's work what she likes to describe as
"dirty realism," but the pieces ended up as a meditation, a haiku,
on the vase, where they cross centuries and touch the past.
Jongerius calls these "the new antiques." They're expensive, exclusive,
and often made in small batches. Her goal isn't to create something everyone
can have. "I try to make products you really love, that you want to
have your whole life, want to pass down to your family," she says and
pauses. Jongerius's Dutch-inflected English has an upswing at the end
of each sentence, so it sounds like she's asking a question instead of making
a statement about her work. "I want to make products that touch people,
and that go further than the values of the design world with its aims of
more and more, cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. I don't believe everything has
to be cheap. It's a commitment to pay for something, to have to save up
for it." This is hardly design for the Target shopper, spurred by a
more-for-less quest that has fueled American design of late, with its pretty
plastics and "blobjects." Jongerius's work is a critique of that--even
if she means it as a subtle one.
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Jongerius epoxyed shards of old pottery together to create 7 Pots/3
Centuries/2 Materials (above), two of which were cast in soft
polyurethane with visible seams (Soft Urn; below).
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Photos: Courtesy Hella Jongerius
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In London's Borough Market, people spend vast sums on rare vegetables with
dirt still clinging to their roots and unpasteurized "artisan"
cheeses fresh from the farm. Here in the coffee shop--where you can't get
a skinny latté or skim milk and none of the chairs match--the crowds
jam past. From this perch overlooking the market, it's clear Jongerius's
aesthetic has many fans. "The more and more, new and new, of the so-called
great design revolution is inhuman," Crawford says from her view of
the market. "It's hard to become attached to things. You always have
to reject what you were. From one year to the next everything from the previous
season is thrown out, invalidated--and it leaves people cold. That's why
Hella is interesting. She brings a newness to old things so you don't have
to chuck everything out. Instead of thinking everything old is worthless,
her work is related to something real and human."
But beyond some trend for the handmade that's the current fad of the upper-middle
classes, Jongerius's work examines what design means--and in Milan those
existential questions were made manifest. Her chandelier for Swarovski,
a crystal frock, evokes the dreamy world of ballrooms and Cinderella dreams.
The light fixture was woven from teardrop-shaped cut crystals and mesh
the company uses in its fashion designs. The party dress is made of questions
cast in lurid pink rubber: Can industrial be affectionate? Can crafts be
contemporary? Will design have to crossbreed? Can I only translate what's
in the air? Can quality be made without affection? In this nexus of ball
gowns and fairy tales, Jongerius looked at the fantasy in which design operates
and probed her own larger questions.
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One of her designs for the Museum of Modern Art's Workspheres
exhibition, Bed in Business (2001; above) is extra-long and has
computer screens at the foot and a keyboard and mouse incorporated in
the textiles.
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Candle Holders for Atlantis Crystal (2001; above).
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Felt stool (2000; above)--which has three layers of felt around a metal
frame--is shaped like the silhouette of a stool.
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Prince and Princess series vase (2000; opposite page).
Photos: Courtesy Hella Jongerius
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This will be her legacy--and it's what Jongerius's department at the design
academy teaches. Called simply Atelier, the program is dedicated to hands-on
work: making and getting messy, experimenting with different methods and
materials. The course started tentatively a couple of years ago, because
so many students were working with computers and only coming up with conceptual
products. They'd forgotten how to make things. "Before we were appointed
to run the school, our predecessors had decided that everything should be
digital," explains Liesbeth in 't Hout, who runs the academy with the
influential trend forecaster Li Edelkoort. "Now there's so much
computer-led design available for less and less money. Here in Holland you
can buy good things everywhere for nothing. We're tired of all those mountains
of good-shaped things. Li and I saw an interest in industrial products made
in smaller series with a more emotional, personal background based on working
with materials, making with your hands. So we decided to create a place
for that in the school." And they immediately thought of Jongerius
to lead the program.
The designer has the students work with a couple of techniques a year, focusing
on one specific material per semester. Last year 15 of her students
traveled to a small town in rural Brazil to work with cowboys on tooling
leather for a month. "I try to teach them to work with smart hands,
so that whatever material they work with, they can think with their hands.
I want them to work as individuals and see what qualities they bring, rather
than imposing the rules of the design profession on everyone the same way.
I try to show them that you can really make a point in design if you connect
all the qualities in yourself with the profession and the world." Jongerius
laughs at the loftiness of her goals and says, "It's just the lesson
of life, you know." Still young, the course was certified as a
degree discipline only last year. So far it has had only one graduate, so
it's hard to gauge Atelier's success, though Crawford says the department
is popular: "Atelier steals students from the other programs,"
she jokes and smiles. "What the course really teaches them is to think."
Thinking through her hands is what Jongerius is all about. You can see it
in her own hands and in the top-floor workshop where all her failed
trials for the Swarovski chandelier are scattered. There are mixing bowls
full of solidified silicone and the pink rubber script she dismissed
as too girly. Beaded curtains from a 99-cent store have been experimented
on, Styrofoam packing peanuts meant to simulate crystals have been strung
together with fishing wire, and attempts to weave the "crystals"
lie abandoned on a worktable. Jongerius stands in her studio holding up
the discarded pink cursive questions. Surrounded by all her experiments
and shelves full of drills, packing tape, and vases, I ask if her work represents
a new direction in design--a shift in thinking about the world. "I
have a bigger story than what the profession is. I want to um, um, uh..."
She struggles to find the words. "It's very hard to describe in
one sentence. I'm going to, though. I would like to make a wider connection
than only making forms or a new product. That is not interesting. In a way,
I hate the design world. It's not my world." Jongerius looks down as
if she's embarrassed by what she's saying. But perhaps that is the future--or
at least one of the futures--of design: the struggle for meaning.
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