Words Marisa Bartolucci and Damaris Colhoun

www.readymadeprojects.com

Fulcrum interviewed Stephen Burks by BlackBerry shortly after he returned from the Milan Furniture Fair. His comments about the furnishings he launched there and the other designs and people he saw give insight into the life and thoughts of a rising product designer.

At the Milan Furniture Fair this spring, Cappellini and Modus introduced new furnishings by you. Tell Fulcrum about the designs and how they came about.

The Cappellini Love Mache tables are based on a concept I had for recycling all the piles of magazines I had lying around, mostly old copies of Domus and Wallpaper, which I figured would make great raw material for something. Mache is a reinvention of the traditional papier-mâché technique, combining shredded magazines with nontoxic adhesives and hardeners, making them eco-friendly. These Mache tables are prototypes. Cappellini plans to have South African artisans produce them.

The Cappellini Love Mache collection emerged out of Stephen Burks's passionate commitment to the environment and to struggling artisans in the developing world.

The initial prototypes were produced and shown for the first time at the Stockholm Furniture Fair in February in collaboration with the students at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts & Design. I’d done a Domestic Recycling workshop there last fall, and the students were happy to help out when I returned with my Craft Café project. By coincidence, Giulio Cappellini was the guest of honor at the fair. Giulio and I had been having discussions for almost a year about collaborating on a more eco-conscious project for Cappellini, but couldn’t manage to meet until Stockholm. He loved some of the prototypes for the Mache collection, and Cappellini Love Mache was born!

As the name suggests, the Cappellini Love Mache table is based on the technique of papier mache. It is made out of a paper structure, stuffed with paper, and then covered with shredded magazines. Nontoxic adhesives and hardeners are used throughout. The Mache process will be taught to artisans in South Africa, who will produce the pieces for Cappellini.

What’s distinctive about your project for Modus?

The Pleats sofa is another artisanal project. I’ve always had difficulty designing seating because it’s so hard to find an innovative point of entry. With the brief to design a new sofa from Modus, I considered not the shape or form but the surface of the sofa. I wanted to develop a more sensuous experience. When I pitched the idea of custom pleating the upholstery for the sofa, Modus said impossible! But then by chance they found a Scottish kilt company that stitches every pleat by hand with specialized machines. We plan to extend the collection to a pleated lounge chair and explore the use of other materials.

What for you were some of the fair’s highlights?

Massimiliano Busnelli, the grandson of the founder of B&B Italia, showed me the company’s new pieces by Jean-Marie Massaud. His new Seven table and iconic Terminal I day bed are beautiful additions to the company’s collection. The advanced molded plastic shell and urethane foam seat were specifically engineered for the piece. What else? I met Nendo’s Oki Sato and Akhiro Ito at the Tod’s opening party, where we were guests of honor with Giulio Cappellini. Several of Cappellini’s designers, including the Nendo collective and I, have been invited to make window display concepts for the new “Looking at Tod’s” project. My window display will be shown in all of the Tod’s flagship stores this summer.

Stephen Burks's Pleats sofa for Modus features a pleated surface that was sewn by expert technicians in a Scottish kilt factory. He admits to having a hard time finding an innovative point of entry when it comes to seating. So here he focused on the surface, in order to develop a more sensuous sitting experience.

What are your main inspirations?

Traveling has really opened my eyes to other ways of working and looking at design, what we’re making, for whom and why.

So all this globetrotting has affected your designing?

Yes. Lately, I’ve been enjoying watching all of the different aspects of what we do influence each other—a textile collection in India inspires a new chair for B&B Italia or a Domestic Recycling workshop in Stockholm becomes a collection of handmade furniture for Cappellini. I really feel a new aesthetic coming to the foreground that values the hand much more than the machine. Design, I believe, can really be a transformative tool in extending artisanal traditions into the future.

Which of your designs do you consider most representative of your thinking and why?

My thinking is always changing, and so my work is too. I’m always most excited by where I’m at today, which keeps the future wide open : )

Some Facts about Stephen Burks: He studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, prodcut design at the Institute of Design and attended Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. He established his design firm, Readymade Projects, in 2003. It has produced products for Artecnica, B & B Italia, Boffi, Calvin Klein, Cappellini and Missoni. He has worked with Aid to Artisans and the Nature Conservancy to create sustainable design in the developing world.