March 2013 • Features
The Creative Process | Material Choices - Scholten & Baijings
The designers plunge into the technicalities of pigment and production to suggest bold new directions for an entire industry.
By Avinash Rajagopal
In July 2011, Stefan Scholten and Carole Baijings were given a tour of Mini’s design studio in Munich, which ended with a display of a concept car. “We thought, this is a real car, this is not conceptual,” Scholten says. “It’s not about imagination anymore.”
In nine months, the duo pushed the limits for car prototypes with Colour One for Mini, a display of automotive innards at the 2012 Milan Furniture Fair. The show has since traveled around Europe, and is on display this month at the TEFAF Maastricht art fair in the Netherlands.
“Building a concept car is a designer’s dream, because it is one of the largest consumer products,” Scholten says. “A bus or an airplane may be bigger, but a car is still directly related to consumers.”
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“We had two kinds of parts in the car,” Scholten says. “The experimental ‘art’ parts were made by hand, in-house. The others were made by some of the finest prototype builders in Germany. We worked with a lot of specialists. Given the advances in plastics, we asked, ‘Why is a wheel still always in two parts, rubber and metal?’ Vincent de Rijk, who does maquettes for Rem Koolhaas, cast the wheel for us in polyurethane.”
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