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Dutch Master
The new Professor at the RCA has ideals underpinned by commercial design success, writes Barbara Chandler
This autumn, Tord Boontje, the celebrated Dutch designer, became Professor and Head of Design Products at London's Royal College of Art. The RCA is the world's only college devoted entirely to post graduate education in art, design and architecture, and attracts a high number of students from abroad. Thus Boontje's new role is generally considered one of the most influential in international design.
But news of this appointment earlier in the year had created ripples of surprise within the design community. Firstly, there was Boontje's age: only 41. And then his style: Boontje is best known for wistful, flowery, fantasy patterns, which contrast dramatically with the robust, bold approach to design of his predecessor, Ron Arad - who is 58, and had held the position for 12 years.
Professor Tord Boontje, however, has packed more into his career so far than others achieve in a lifetime. He has a string of impressive products and projects to his name, albeit mainly accomplished in the last ten years. His designs, including lighting, furniture, tableware, fabrics, and even jewellery, have achieved commercial success not only in the UK and Europe but also in the USA and Japan.
“But I am hardly wonder boy anymore,” he exclaims, generously sparing a couple of hours to talk in the RCA's canteen, when just starting his new job.
Unfazed by questions about his relative youth, he shared plans for the future which are truly inspiring. Boontje is enthusiastic and focused and certain qualities of idealism are tempered with practicality. “The reputation of the RCA, its resources and influence, are unparalleled,” he said. “People seem to forget that I have already taught here. I belong.”
It is evident that he has a strong social conscious (indeed many of his design projects have brought employment to poorer countries such as Guatamala, Colombia and Senegal). “I intend my students to design for everyone, including the elderly, the sick, and the disabled. And to design for the whole world - with all its humanitarian and ecological problems - not just the West. At the same time, of course, we will focus on function, and indeed on beauty - and even the fantastic.”
Born in Enschede in the Netherlands in 1968, and with a Swedish mother, Boontje has two degrees in industrial design, the first from the famous Design Academy in Eindhoven and the second an MA from the RCA itself, awarded in 1994. Then Boontje came back to the RCA in 2000, as a tutor in Design Products. Four years later he left to set up his own design company, Studio Tord Boontje.
His rise to fame has been rapid. Boontje first made his mark with a show with the British Council in Prague in 2001. It was filled with his “rough and ready furniture” - chairs and tables hand-made from raw wood, punched metal and blankets, with laser-cut trailing lights.
“Actually, these were probably the only materials that I could afford. But it did teach me the beauty of abandoned objects - possibly an antidote to design often dominated by the glossy, the slick and the perfect.” And his ‘tranSglass' range of elegant glassware fashioned from re-cycled bottles is still in production in South America today.
Then Boontje was discovered by Nadja Swarovski, first lady of crystal, and fifth generation design director of her family firm. She commissioned the Blossom chandelier, with its changing, sparkling LEDs, for the celebrated Crystal Palace project in 2002. A production version is now available in four colours, is a best seller and a strong feature of Swarovski's new lighting concession at Harrods in London's Knightsbridge.
But the big Boontje breakthrough came in 2004. This time his patron was Italian design doyenne, Patrizia Moroso, who commissioned Happy Ever After, a display for the Moroso furniture company's Milan showroom. It featured trailing leafy laser-cut stems and fabric-wrapped chairs.
“I wanted to combine nature with technology,” Boontje said, giving seven chairs “names from a fairy tale” such as Princess and Pirate. Titles of later products have been just as romantic - Boontje calls them his “narrative names”. A rug called Little Field of Flowers, for example. This luxuriant assembly of felted petals for Nani Marquina won Boontje a Red Dot Award.
Boontje subsequently designed a string of Moroso production pieces, and many are now installed in the company's large and glamorous new London showroom (shared with Flos at 7-15 Rosebery Avenue, EC1). Pride of place goes to the Shadowy outdoor chairs woven in Senegal, each in slightly different bright colours with slender forms prancing on stick-like legs like insects.
Indeed the last five years have seen an outpouring of products from Studio Tord Boontje, which moved to France in 2004 (although Boontje himself is back in South London, with his family, to take up his teaching role). Using a new technique to die-cut heavy-duty paper, he designed the Midsummer light for Artecnica with a luxuriant cascade of petals and foliage. A curtain panel called Until Dawn uses similar techniques, and now there is jewellery, too.
Table Stories plates and glassware for Authentics were launched in 2005 and have become global best sellers. His second range of fabrics for Kvadrat has just gone into the company's smart London showroom on Shepherdess Walk, London N1). Crystal furniture for Swarovski was launched in Paris at the beginning of this year, whilst other clients have included Hansgrohe (bathroom accessories) and Philips (a patterned coffee machine). Mosaics and furniture for Bisazza were launched in Milan in 2009 and his studio has two major architectural projects currently ongoing in Taiwan and Florida
But Boontje's most famous product is probably the Garland lampshade, already iconic, and in the permanent collections of both MoMA in New York and our own V&A. It is a flat-packed single sheet of cut-out metal flowers and leaves (in this case acid-etched). The user shapes this at will into an exotic cascade around a bare bulb. Created for Habitat in 2003, it became almost instantly a best seller - indeed at one point there was a waiting list! Garland is currently still available in bronze, copper and steel for £19.
Much has been written on Boontje's ways of working - he has been described as a designer ‘on the cusp of craft and design'. In truth, he is gentle and open-minded, gets inspiration from everywhere, and may generate one pattern from a doodle on paper, and another from an advanced computer programme. His work has been an intriguing mix of craft - hand-cutting, embroidery, stamping and stencilling - and the computer, which translates sketches into intricate product templates, and controls lasers, printers and looms.
This creative process goes from craft through design to technology. “But it is emotion that is behind everything I do and I still believe you have to start by hand.”
Boontje has already been the subject of a major book by Martina Margetts (Senior Tutor in Critical & Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art), which was published in the UK in 2007. Tord himself worked on its unusual design with a cover of stiffened gauze over soft flowers, and white pages of paper in a perforated bird and flower pattern. Margetts, in her preface, distills what is perhaps the essential Boontje, describing him as a William Morris for our times, whose design has “a moral root”. His imaginative products, she said, make our hearts beat faster and our minds more curious, and he achieves daily his steadfast goal “to create a very positive, forward-looking caring and loving world”.
