Repeat by Hella Jongerius:

upholstery textile for Maharam

Metropolis July 2002 issue (6/3) -coverstory-

The Smart Hands of Hella Jongerius by Jennifer Kabat
The Dutch designer--working the seams between craft and art, past and present--explores the industrialized one-off.

This is how Jongerius works: she finds her muse in industrial processes and their debris. Sitting in her office in Rotterdam, the designer leans forward and says, "I love what I find on factory floors--the waste. I'm like, 'Is this trash?' It's pure gold for me." She fingers her bobbed brown hair. A tall woman with a broad face, Jongerius is quintessentially Dutch in her appearance. Her hands are elegant, but her nails are short and chipped from working with materials and experimenting with manufacturing techniques.

MoMA's design curator Paola Antonelli pronounces Jongerius "a unique talent who has no rivals." Aaron Betsky, head of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, declares, "She's one of the most significant designers in the world today." Jongerius will have two museum shows next March (planned separately and on different continents, no less): one in New York at the Cooper-Hewitt, the other at London's Design Museum. Alice Rawsthorn, director of the latter, puts Jongerius in the same league as Annie Albers, Charlotte Perriand, and Eileen Gray.

At this year's Milan furniture fair Ilse Crawford commissioned Jongerius to create a one-off chandelier for crystal-maker Swarovski. An early proponent of the designer's work when editor of British Elle Decoration, Crawford put some Jongerius vases into production while at the helm of Donna Karan's home collection. She also teaches with Jongerius at the Design Academy Eindhoven; they both run departments there. "Hella is the most interesting designer of her generation," Crawford says. "She's reinventing the domestic interior. Jongerius is the new Vermeer."

Strong praise for someone not even ten years into her career. Jongerius, 39, went back to school to study design at Eindhoven in her late twenties. Though she specialized in textiles, the Maharam fabrics are the first she's ever produced. As soon as she left school, she was snapped up by Droog Design, which included Jongerius in its revolutionary first show and continued to show her work until 1999. "She is the most interesting designer to emerge from Droog," Rawsthorn says, "and the only one whose reputation is completely independent of the group now." Clearly Jongerius no longer needs that connection, but is much too Dutch, too restrained, and too polite to say that in an interview. She now runs her own studio, JongeriusLab.

Before Christmas the studio was based in a gallery. Currently JongeriusLab is housed--for at least the next six months--in Rotterdam's former Turkish Embassy. A rundown building with a magical air, its ballroom has exposed rafters and a lone disco ball hanging where an elegant chandelier once did. Grand staircases with cracked marble tiles wind their way up the two stories, and mirrored walls make the whole place seem like an enchanted squat or a kid's ideal playhouse. Jongerius has to run between offices spread across different floors, with a workshop on the top. She's in constant motion. "Now me and my assistants don't need to go to the gym," she jokes, jogging up the stairs.

Sitting in her ground-floor office, whose windows are painted with a border of exotic birds, Jongerius points to swatches of her Maharam fabric pinned to the wall. "The mill was great," she says. "When I visit a factory I'm always amazed with new machines and processes. It's where I find my inspiration." On that first trip she didn't find her gold on the floor, in the production mistakes and castoffs, but in the machines themselves. Amid the crashing noise of the giant looms, she discovered jacquard cards. Like the IBM punch cards that programmed the old mainframe computers, they tell the machines what to weave.

"It's the sort of thing I would overlook," says Maharam's vice president of design, Mary Murphy. She recruited Jongerius to work with the company and accompanied her to the mill. "I spend so much time in mills, I'm used to seeing raw samples, and looking at things with writing all over them and ignoring them, but that's what she celebrates. Hella can just see differently because she comes from the outside."

Indeed when Jongerius saw the card, she thought, "Yeah, that's it, use the data from the mills." The holes punched into the cardboard became the inspiration for her Dot pattern, the first of two fabric sets. On it, the perforations are translated and woven into dots and circles, some just an outline, others pixellated. One section of dots is so tiny that they look as if they're a necktie pattern. To make the links to the cards' perforations even clearer, some of the bolts will be screen-printed in white with the cards' actual patterns running across one edge of the textile.

Jongerius was also let loose in the mill's design archives. "Hella's eyes just grew wider and wider," Murphy says. "She had this glazed-over look. The designers kept bringing out more and more fabric. They hauled out these big books with swatches glued into them, different patterns that the mill's woven over the years."

"I was like a kid in a candy store," Jongerius says, laughing. "Mary and the designers at the mill said, 'We're going to show you a lot of fabric, and you can choose whatever you want and take it home.' I loved everything. They'd show me something, and I'd say, yes, and they'd snip off a piece for me. Then they'd come back with another pattern, explain that it was special because of this and that. In the end, I left with hundreds of samples." She finally distilled them down to just a few patterns she used as references for her second textile, the Classic design. Made of bands of traditional motifs, it has stripes and an oversize houndstooth check plus a thin line of pheasants flying across it. None of the bands in either the Dot or Classic fabrics are the same size and span from two to three meters before repeating, an unheard-of length in traditional upholstery.

When Jongerius went to the factory, the only firm idea she had was that she wanted to "make an upholstery fabric where if you have ten chairs, you don't see a repeat in every chair, so they look related to each other but not the same." She used the upholstery to turn every piece of furniture that will ever be covered in it into a Hella Jongerius. By weaving with different-size swaths and strips of patterns in each warp, she makes it impossible for anyone using the fabric to create a sense of uniformity or perfection. Jongerius has designed in manufactured customization. "The whole point is," she says, kicking off her shoes so she won't damage the bolt of Dot fabric she's just rolled out as she walks over it, "you don't see the repeats, so you have an industrial product that looks like it's been woven specially for you." Murphy explains, "It's a totally revolutionary way to look at textiles, one that really challenges how the furniture industry uses fabrics."

Jongerius mines the seams between craft, design, and art. When she sets out to create something, she explores what that object means, considering its heritage and archetypes. This information gives whatever Jongerius touches a layered feel, where history and technology, past and present, high and low rub up against one another. "She uses history not for references, the way the postmodernists did, but for the raw materials out of which she makes her work," Betsky says. "She doesn't treat it with deference, but as a particularly Dutch cultural legacy."

Jongerius also manipulates production techniques to create industrialized one-offs. "Future craft," Crawford calls it, adding: "Hella's not heavy-handed in her thinking. It's not some middle-class joke, like William Morris. She thinks about how to translate craft values to a machine-made object without making it hokey or folksy."

You can see this--feel it in fact--in Jongerius's B-set dishes, which celebrate deformity. Pick them up, eat off them; it's almost shocking to use them. The dishes seem so fragile and precious that they make the simple lunch--just salad, bread, and cheese--with Hella and her assistant feel special. When she designed them, Jongerius was thinking of those dishes you inherit from Grandma, a bit chipped and worn--no longer perfect but infused with love and meaning. She took her serially produced china and fired it in an oven so hot the dishes warped, making each unique. She stamped them with the "recipe," as she calls it, for the glaze and porcelain, so their heritage is made manifest.

When making a vase--and she's designed many--Jongerius turns to classic examples for inspiration. Her 7 Pots/3 Centuries/2 Materials series started with shards from a museum. She built new pots from the pieces and painted them. Cappellini distributed two vases in 1998, cast with the seams visible to show where the pieces are joined together. Then they were sprayed with car paint, her riff on glazing. Jongerius's Groove and Long Neck bottles, based on traditional shapes and materials, force porcelain and glass to meld together--a physical impossibility, so she taped them together with red packing tape, bearing the legend "Handle with care." The tape, car paint, and seams gave Jongerius's work what she likes to describe as "dirty realism," but the pieces ended up as a meditation, a haiku, on the vase, where they cross centuries and touch the past.

Jongerius calls these "the new antiques." They're expensive, exclusive, and often made in small batches. Her goal isn't to create something everyone can have. "I try to make products you really love, that you want to have your whole life, want to pass down to your family," she says and pauses. Jongerius's Dutch-inflected English has an upswing at the end of each sentence, so it sounds like she's asking a question instead of making a statement about her work. "I want to make products that touch people, and that go further than the values of the design world with its aims of more and more, cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. I don't believe everything has to be cheap. It's a commitment to pay for something, to have to save up for it." This is hardly design for the Target shopper, spurred by a more-for-less quest that has fueled American design of late, with its pretty plastics and "blobjects." Jongerius's work is a critique of that--even if she means it as a subtle one.

In London's Borough Market, people spend vast sums on rare vegetables with dirt still clinging to their roots and unpasteurized "artisan" cheeses fresh from the farm. Here in the coffee shop--where you can't get a skinny latté or skim milk and none of the chairs match--the crowds jam past. From this perch overlooking the market, it's clear Jongerius's aesthetic has many fans. "The more and more, new and new, of the so-called great design revolution is inhuman," Crawford says from her view of the market. "It's hard to become attached to things. You always have to reject what you were. From one year to the next everything from the previous season is thrown out, invalidated--and it leaves people cold. That's why Hella is interesting. She brings a newness to old things so you don't have to chuck everything out. Instead of thinking everything old is worthless, her work is related to something real and human."

But beyond some trend for the handmade that's the current fad of the upper-middle classes, Jongerius's work examines what design means--and in Milan those existential questions were made manifest. Her chandelier for Swarovski, a crystal frock, evokes the dreamy world of ballrooms and Cinderella dreams. The light fixture was woven from teardrop-shaped cut crystals and mesh the company uses in its fashion designs. The party dress is made of questions cast in lurid pink rubber: Can industrial be affectionate? Can crafts be contemporary? Will design have to crossbreed? Can I only translate what's in the air? Can quality be made without affection? In this nexus of ball gowns and fairy tales, Jongerius looked at the fantasy in which design operates and probed her own larger questions.

One of her designs for the Museum of Modern Art's Workspheres exhibition, Bed in Business (2001; above) is extra-long and has computer screens at the foot and a keyboard and mouse incorporated in the textiles.


This will be her legacy--and it's what Jongerius's department at the design academy teaches. Called simply Atelier, the program is dedicated to hands-on work: making and getting messy, experimenting with different methods and materials. The course started tentatively a couple of years ago, because so many students were working with computers and only coming up with conceptual products. They'd forgotten how to make things. "Before we were appointed to run the school, our predecessors had decided that everything should be digital," explains Liesbeth in 't Hout, who runs the academy with the influential trend forecaster Li Edelkoort. "Now there's so much computer-led design available for less and less money. Here in Holland you can buy good things everywhere for nothing. We're tired of all those mountains of good-shaped things. Li and I saw an interest in industrial products made in smaller series with a more emotional, personal background based on working with materials, making with your hands. So we decided to create a place for that in the school." And they immediately thought of Jongerius to lead the program.

The designer has the students work with a couple of techniques a year, focusing on one specific material per semester. Last year 15 of her students traveled to a small town in rural Brazil to work with cowboys on tooling leather for a month. "I try to teach them to work with smart hands, so that whatever material they work with, they can think with their hands. I want them to work as individuals and see what qualities they bring, rather than imposing the rules of the design profession on everyone the same way. I try to show them that you can really make a point in design if you connect all the qualities in yourself with the profession and the world." Jongerius laughs at the loftiness of her goals and says, "It's just the lesson of life, you know." Still young, the course was certified as a degree discipline only last year. So far it has had only one graduate, so it's hard to gauge Atelier's success, though Crawford says the department is popular: "Atelier steals students from the other programs," she jokes and smiles. "What the course really teaches them is to think."

Thinking through her hands is what Jongerius is all about. You can see it in her own hands and in the top-floor workshop where all her failed trials for the Swarovski chandelier are scattered. There are mixing bowls full of solidified silicone and the pink rubber script she dismissed as too girly. Beaded curtains from a 99-cent store have been experimented on, Styrofoam packing peanuts meant to simulate crystals have been strung together with fishing wire, and attempts to weave the "crystals" lie abandoned on a worktable. Jongerius stands in her studio holding up the discarded pink cursive questions. Surrounded by all her experiments and shelves full of drills, packing tape, and vases, I ask if her work represents a new direction in design--a shift in thinking about the world. "I have a bigger story than what the profession is. I want to um, um, uh...." She struggles to find the words. "It's very hard to describe in one sentence. I'm going to, though. I would like to make a wider connection than only making forms or a new product. That is not interesting. In a way, I hate the design world. It's not my world." Jongerius looks down as if she's embarrassed by what she's saying. But perhaps that is the future--or at least one of the futures--of design: the struggle for meaning.

Metropolis July 2002 issue (6/3) -coverstory-

The Smart Hands of Hella Jongerius
by Jennifer Kabat