Restlessly going forward

British designer Ross Lovegrove combines natural forms with latest technologies

The majority of design is vacuous," says British design star Ross Lovegrove. "It comes from nowhere and it goes nowhere. There has to be a groundwork as to why something is created, bar that it looks nice".
Lovegrove may have been criticizing his profession, but the words may also serve as a pep talk to himself to aim high. "My character dictates that I constantly live within a swirl of emotions and misgivings that lead me to question right down to the bone the very need of things," Lovegrove says. This kind of self-questioning seems not uncommon among product designers, who rightfully fret over simply adding to a glut of consumer products. Lovegrove has worked wisely, however, and big-name clients such as Apple, Giorgio Armani, British Airways and Sony have sought out his design talents.
Twenty years into his career, the Welsh-born Lovegrove has assembled a body of work - ranging from seating and lighting to water bottles and home accessories - which he sees as an attempt to marry beauty with logic. The beauty is organic, natural forms. "We respond well to form," the furniture and product designer says. "There's not a straight line on the human body, so in a way what I do is very legitimate. It's touching people's souls". The logical component of his work can be seen in his choice to utilize the latest technologies to achieve his ideas.
Lovegrove's portfolio includes Italian clients such as Edra, Cappellini, Driade, Fratelli Guzzini and Luceplan. For the latter, the designer created the Agaricon table lamp, a good example of the Lovegrove design approach. The lamp is mushroom-shaped (agaricon is "mushroom" in Greek) and its semi-transparent ribbed casing contains a light source activated by an aluminum ring around the casing's edge. Nature meets technology. For furniture manufacturer Edra, Lovegrove used plastics more commonly used for car bumpers and crash helmet linings to create his rounded Air One and Air Two seating designs.
Lovegrove's most striking furniture design thus far is likely his magnesium Go chair for American furniture manufacturer Bernhardt. "You can walk in a space that is just pure concrete walls in a warehouse and, if you light these chairs beautifully, they are like people themselves," says the London-based designer. "You can create the organic in them". Lovegrove followed up this project with his Orbit chair for Bernhardt. The design is his take on the classic Scandinavian plywood stacking chair. True to his fascination for the latest technologies, the chair's rigid structural spine supports a seat and back which is otherwise paper-thin thanks to new manufacturing capabilities.
"Organic essentialism" and "supernatural" are the labels which Lovegrove attaches to his design mix of nature and technology. (The latter description is also the title of his first monograph, published earlier this year by Phaidon Press and featuring a critical appraisal by Museum of Modern Art design curator Paola Antonelli.) Though his work shows a love for timeless forms, the chances of Lovegrove producing the elusive "timeless classic" seem remote - he restlessly looks forward. "I am an absolute committed futurist," the British designer says. "I don't want to make anything which remotely could have been made yesterday. I want to produce things that perhaps, when I‚m dead and buried, people will say that guy really had a scintillating view of how life could be".

Publication Date: 2004-11-21
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=4629