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The designer is showing both functional and conceptual pieces at London Design Festival for Aram, Flos and SCP ICON: You usually have a display at your own store, but this year you are working with the Aram Store and Flos. What will you be showing in these venues? MICHAEL ANASTASSIADES: In the Aram Store, we will have an exhibition of products launched this year, including Mobile Chandeliers, a continuation of some of my earlier designs from 2008 – curved and linear forms in black lacquered brass, partnered with mouth-blown opaline glass spheres. The Happy Together pendants come as single globe and brass rod or in groups of four or ten. I have always been fascinated with the sphere for its purity as the ultimate primal form. The design of these series started as a simple exercise of repetition, arranging them in perfect stacks or clusters in an evolving logical sequence. The family is inspired by unusual fictitious ball configurations in precision and cue sports while at the same time making references to the disciplined geometrical language used in modernist design. To the Top is one design in a series of table lamps which references the MT8 or Bauhaus lamp by Carl Jacob Jucker and Wilhelm Wagenfeld. The diffuser rests on a brass tripod base which gives the appearance of balancing blocks that are about to fall down. At, Flos we will be launching showing three new designs: Captain Flint, Extra and Copycat. ICON: You’ve always been known as a lighting designer. But I’m told you are now venturing into furniture? MA: I specialised as a lighting designer mainly because I can’t do everything. But designing furniture is not very different from lighting – it’s the same approach and philosophy and I’m starting to do more of it. For example, during LDF I’m also launching a sofa for SCP as part of a series by four or five different designers – the Rochester is a two-seat sofa with a solid oak base and a narrow tapering at the feet. It explores the notion of the boundaries between public and private space. It’s an intimate piece in scale, and basic and strict in form. The idea is to explore the idea of privacy in public, the way that a sofa defines, provides and creates this. There is a gap between the frame and the seat, which adds lightness to the body. Both arms and legs have the same length to create an intimate, yet comfortable, place to rest. It’s a sofa aimed at a waiting or lounge space, but could also be used in the domestic sphere. Pick up a copy of our current issue for more detailed highlights of LDF, which takes place from 19-27 September |
Words Debika Ray |
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