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Ron Arad helps a Dutch label deliver its curious creations to a mass market.
By Shonquis Moreno
The Metropolis Observed
July 2002
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Yuko Tsurumaru's stacking Holo stools (above) and Dumoffice's Whoosh
light (below) exemplify Hidden's combination of conceptual wit and
practical manufacturing.
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Photo by Courtesy Hidden
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Founded two years ago, Netherlands-based Hidden is a playful company marked
by resourcefulness, imagination, unpretentious functionality, and wit. Hidden
products glow in the dark. They swell, they shrink, they roll. They have
intriguing names: onomatopoeic like the Plobb! wastebasket; suggestive like
the Marilyn I Can See Your Knickers chair; ironic like Miriam van der Lubbe's
WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) mirror. But visitors to the Milan
furniture fair in April picked up on a new characteristic--and another telling
name. The Hidden kiosk there was called Troppotypes, which suggests prototypes
but incorporates the Italian word for "too much," indicating the
direction that Hidden's new art director, Ron Arad, is taking the product
line: toward affordable mass-produced, high-quality design.
To this creatively unbridled manufacturer Arad brings precision, pragmatism,
and a critical eye. "Ideas are the cheapest link in the chain,"
says the designer, who has had rather a lot of good ideas in more than three
decades of designing, including the Reinventing the Wheel rolling storage
unit, the Bookworm shelf, and the Tom Vac chair. "An idea is never
enough. You have to demonstrate how you will go about producing the idea.
There's a big difference between manufacturing and fabricating."
Before Arad ascended from designer to art director, Hidden worked with 35
international designers to make pieces like Atelier Oi's glow-in-the-dark
bed frame and a prolific subcollection by N2, including a chair that
is a lamp and the ubiquitous Spherize, a high-pop polyethylene chair that
can be blown up with a bicycle pump. "There was no 'No,'" says
Mark Gutjahr of German design studio bibi*gutjahr about the unusual freedom
that marked his collaboration with Hidden. Indeed the company's name signifies
founder Leon van Gerwen's quixotic wish to produce the designer's idea purely,
without the manufacturer's usual blunting, diluting influence. While
preserving van Gerwen's ideal, Arad will see to it that the label's collectible
objects are marketable too.
In the past, partly because there was no one to vet ideas rigorously and
scrutinize them throughout production, some Hidden pieces sold only to museums.
"With the new collection we are no longer in this field of arty
products but of products that are available in quantities and affordable
for a wider group of consumers," van Gerwen says. To this end the number
of Hidden designers is down to a lean 25 or so, and Arad has introduced
nine new objects. "These Hidden products are slightly polemic, clever,
witty," he says. "This isn't anonymous department-store stuff.
A good idea for me is an idea that wasn't there before. There is no sense
in designing something new if it isn't really new. This is not about decorating."
The new collection includes the blow-molded Holo stools by Yuko Tsurumaru,
which resemble a totem pole when stacked; the Compass table by Dunne &
Raby, embedded with functioning compasses; and Whoosh, a pair of Siamese
twin-like lightbulbs drawn apart like pulled taffy. "Whoosh is
a good example of what we're trying to do," Arad says. "It's a
sweet little product; but when we found it, it stood there helpless. It
needed serious manufacturing. It needed very special tuning. It needed someone
to pay attention to it."
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