If Joris Laarman is irked by the blogosphere, the designer is hiding it well. In a brief period leading up to yesterday’s opening of his solo exhibition at the New York gallery Friedman Benda, coverage of the show had leaked online. Photographs suggested that the installation was overly focused on the Bone series, a collection of seats and other furniture pieces whose forms are based on an algorithm mimicking the growth patterns of bones and trees.
To be sure, all of the final products of the Bone series are on display at Friedman Benda. “We wanted to present it as a complete body of work,” Laarman said at last night’s opening, gesticulating with blackened hands. (They’re actually stained with tungsten carbide from polishing the Bridge Table; the truss-like armature of the table echoes the Bone structure, while its beveled-edge top is magnificently reflective.) But at his Amsterdam-based studio, which now comprises 30 people, “We are actually traveling seven different roads at the moment; we’re creating a new language.”
“Several weeks ago I was telling an interviewer that, after I graduated, for three years I was known as the Heatwave guy,” he added, referring to the sensation-making radiator he made while still at Design Academy Eindhoven. “People like to pigeonhole, but they also get tired of hearing the same thing. So do I: I never want to be stuck in one kind of style.”
There was not a heat-emitting curlicue to be seen at the exhibition, officially called “Joris Laarman Lab.” Another student work did make the cut: Ivy, a series of grips mounted to a climbing wall, predates Heatwave, but it boasts a similar rococo inflection. “’Let’s do something that’s not about efficiency,’” Laarman recalled thinking to himself. “I wanted to do something about the joy of getting there, I wanted this balance between something decorative and joyful and something functional.” The Bones series was another blast from the past. The research for this project began in 2004, and was ultimately developed with the German automaker Opel. The nature-adhering algorithm removes structural material where it is redundant.
Many new and unexpected works were displayed, too. Among the seven different roads is In Case of 1,000 Books, a bookcase that resulted from serendipity. The model-making workshop that Laarman had used for Bones also is responsible for OMA’s maquettes. In interacting with the model makers, and seeing their work for OMA, he realized that he wanted to deploy their talents for something larger in scale than models. Hence In Case of 1,000 Books was born. “I wanted to translate the craftsmanship of the model maker not into something that resembles a building, but the building itself,” he said. Standing 5.6 meters tall, the enclosed glass-and-concrete form is seemingly randomly crisscrossed by stainless-steel bracing, sitting “on the border of furniture and architecture.”
“At the same time it’s a kind of monument to books. It contains about as many books as an early e-reader could hold.”
Monuments are usually built to institutions, technologies, and other phenomena nearing the end of their lives. In Case of 1,000 Books may be the one moment in “Joris Laarman Lab” that ponders obsolescence. The rest of the exhibition shows Laarman mining the new for opportunities—synthesizing concepts and matching strange bedfellows in the process. Take Paper Planes, which is an expanded version of the concept proposed for the Guggenheim Museum exhibition “Contemplating the Void”: Synthesizing the efforts of German and Dutch companies, Laarman has imagined a swarm of quadrotor-motorized paper planes behaving much like a flock of birds. And working with the British company Robofold has yielded Asimov, a chair made by the robotic folding of sheet metals, a fabrication process that lends itself to easy mass-customization.
In a previous interview I conducted with Laarman for Whitewall magazine, he explained, “I really want to be in the middle of human capabilities, of technological possibilities, and of what’s interesting culturally. I’m neither a scientist nor an autonomous artist or designer. Still, I want to pull from all these disciplines.”
And what about the dark side of the blogosphere? Comments leading up to “Joris Laarman Lab” largely dismissed works like Bone and Asimov for formally copycatting more renowned elders like Ron Arad. Last night Laarman told me that those armchair critics are missing the point. “To me it’s interesting to sculpt with codes, with processes and with theories. I’m totally not interested in one expressing his feelings about beautiful shapes.”
The exhibition is on view at Friedman Benda through April 10.