Indonesian non-profit Sungai Watch has unveiled the debut furniture launch from its design studio Sungai Design, aimed at creating useful products from the mountains of plastic waste that it fishes from Bali’s rivers every day.
The Ombak lounge chair, created in collaboration with American designer Mike Russek, is made using a sheet material produced entirely from discarded plastic bags, with around 2,000 needed for every chair.
The bags are collected by Sungai Watch, which is on a mission to eliminate ocean plastic pollution using its own system of floating barriers to capture the waste as it flows along Indonesia’s rivers.
Sungai design has launched its first-ever product
Since its inception three years ago, the organisation has installed 270 barriers and collected more than 1.8 million kilograms of plastic, resulting in a huge stockpile of material.
Plastic bags are the most frequently collected item and also the least sought after in terms of future value, which led the team to focus on creating a product collection using this readily available resource.
“Collecting and amassing plastic waste solves one part of the problem of plastic pollution, the second challenge is what to actually do with all of this plastic,” said Kelly Bencheghib, who co-founded Sungai Watch with her brothers Sam and Gary.
The Ombak lounge chair is made from discarded plastic bags
“As we collected hundreds of thousands of kilograms of plastics, we started to look at plastic as an excellent source material for everyday products we all need and use, from furniture to small goods to even art,” she added.
Sungai Design has created two variations of the Ombak lounge chair – with and without armrests – manufactured in Bali using processes that aim to minimise waste during production.
The plastic bags are thoroughly washed to remove any impurities before being shredded and heat-pressed to form hard, durable sheets.
The bags are heat-pressed to form sheets
Precision CNC cutting machinery is used to carve out the different components, which are carefully shaped to minimise material use and leave no offcuts.
The panels are connected by a concealed metal structure, resulting in a pure and visually lightweight form with a simple slatted construction.
Although the design is available in three distinct colourways – Granite Black, Ocean Blue and Concrete White – the upcycling process produces slight variations in the tone and texture of the material, meaning each chair has a unique quality.
Ombak means wave in Indonesian and the name references Sungai Design’s commitment to cleaning up rivers and oceans.
In line with this aim, Sundai Design has pledged to minimise its carbon footprint and put in place processes to audit and track the sources of the plastic used in its products.
The company is planning to release other products using the same material and, as a social enterprises, will donate part of its revenue to Sungai Watch to further the project as it seeks to clean up rivers in Indonesia and beyond.
The chair was designed to minimise material use and leave no offcuts
“There is so much potential with this material,” added Sam Bencheghib. “When you choose a chair from our collection, you’re not just selecting a piece of furniture; you’re embracing the transformation from waste to a beautiful, functional piece of art that has found its place in your home.”
Every year, Indonesia accounts for 1.3 million of the eight million tonnes of plastic that end up in our oceans, making it one of the world’s worst marine polluters.
Other attempts at collecting this waste and finding new uses for it have come from design studio Space Available, which set up a circular design museum with a recycling station and facade made of 200,000 plastic bottles in Bali in 2022.
The chair is available in three colours
The studio also teamed up with DJ Peggy Gou turn rubbish collected from streets and waterways in Indonesia into a chair with an integrated vinyl shelf.
“The trash is just everywhere, in the streets and rivers,” Space Available founder Daniel Mitchell told Dezeen.
“It’s not the fault of the people, there’s just very little structural support, waste collection or education,” he added. “Households are left to dispose of their own waste and most ends up in rivers or being burned.”
It features over 100 works that make use of textile, fibre and thread from over 50 artists from across the globe, spanning from the 1960s to the present day.
The exhibition explores how artists have used textiles to express their lived experience
The exhibition is designed to challenge the perception of textiles being solely domestic or craft practices and instead features textile works that relate a story of resistance and rebellion as well as pieces that present narratives of emancipation and joy.
Johnson explained that textiles offer a meaningful medium to express personal and political issues due to their tactile nature and intimate connection to daily life.
“Textiles are one of the most under-examined mediums in art history and in fact history itself,” Johnson said. “They are an intrinsic part of our everyday lives. When we’re born, we’re shrouded in a piece of fabric. Everyday we wrap ourselves in textiles,” she continued.
“They’re really this very intimate, tactile part of our lives and therefore perhaps the most intrinsic, meaningful way to express ourselves.”
Feminist artist Judy Chicago’s Birth Project depicts birth as a mystical and confrontational process
The exhibition is structured into six thematic sections. The first, called Subversive Stitch, presents works that challenge binary conceptions of gender and sexuality.
The section includes feminist artist Judy Chicago’s Birth Project, which vividly depicts the glory, pain and mysticism of giving birth, as well as a piece from South African artist Nicholas Hlobo, which, despite initially appearing as a painting, is made using ribbon and leather stitched into a canvas.
Another section of the exhibition is titled Bearing Witness, which brings together artists who employ textiles to confront and protest political injustices and systems of violent oppression.
Artist Teresa Margolles creates collective tapestries that trigger conversations on police brutality
Included in this section are tapestries by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles that commemorate the lives of individuals including Eric Garner and Jadeth Rosano López.
Garner was an African-American man killed in 2014 by NYPD police officer Daniel Pantaleo, who put Garner into a chokehold during arrest. López was a seventeen-year old-girl assassinated in Panama City.
Margolles used fabric that had been placed in contact with the victims’ deceased bodies and collaborated with embroiderers from their respective local communities to create the tapestries.
The Wound and Repair sections includes work from American artist and activist Harmony Hammond’s Bandaged Grid series, in which layered fabric is used to evoke imagery reminiscent of an injured body.
Tau Lewis’ fabric assemblages offer new narratives of black histories
While violence and brutality are key themes examined in the exhibition, it also showcases how textiles can be used to create narratives of hope. The final, most expansive section of the exhibition is titled Ancestral Threads, which encompasses works created to inspire a sense of optimism and reconnect with ancestral practices.
“This section not only explores artists processing exploitative and violent colonial and imperialist histories, but also celebrates the artists who are re-summoning and relearning ancient knowledge systems to imagine a different kind of future,” Johnson explained.
Canadian multimedia artist Tau Lewis’s work titled The Coral Reef Preservation Society is a patchwork assemblage of recycled fabrics and seashells including fragments of textured denim.
The work pays homage to the enslaved women and children thrown overboard in the Middle Passage, the historical transportation route used during the Atlantic slave trade. These women and children have been reimagined as underwater sea creatures to transform the narrative into one of regeneration.
Vicuña revives the art of the quipu in her installation Quipu Austral
A large installation by Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña titled Quipu Austral is situated towards the end of the exhibition. The installation takes the form of billowing ribbons hanging from the ceiling.
Vicuña references quipu, a form of recording used by a number cultures in Andean South America. Quipu was a ancient writing system which used knotted textile cords to communicate information.
Other sections in the exhibition include Fabric of Everyday, which explores the daily uses of textiles, as well as Borderlands, which examines how textiles have been used to challenge ideas around belonging.
These sections feature works such as Shelia Hicks’ colourful woven bundles and Margarita Cabrera’s soft sculpture cacti crafted from reclaimed US border patrol uniforms.
Mexican-American artist Margarita Cabrera uses reclaimed border patrol uniforms in her work
“We hope that people might come out of this exhibition feeling invigorated and moved by the stories of resilience and rebellion embedded in the work but also hope and emancipation,” Johnson said.
“I hope that the show might inspire people to pick up a needle and thread themselves and use it to express their own lived experience.”
The show is a partnership between the Barbican and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and was co-curated by Barbican curators Johnson, Wells Fray-Smith and Diego Chocano, in collaboration with Amanda Pinatih from the Stedelijk.
Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art is at the Barbican Centre until 26 May 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.
Partnership content
This video was produced by Dezeen for the Barbican Centre as part of a partnership. Find out more about Dezeen’s partnership content here.
British design studio Seymourpowell has put cheap electronic goods under the spotlight with Un-Made, a project imagining four possible ways to design for quick disassembly and recycling.
As part of the project, Seymourpowell devised four automated disassembly mechanism concepts using an electric toothbrush as an example for their animated graphics.
Each of the mechanisms could be built into a product during manufacturing and then activated in a factory at the end of the item’s life.
Un-Made suggests automated disassembly mechanisms for an electric toothbrush
The first Un-Made concept is a pin mechanism. Similar to the action of opening a SIM card slot on a smartphone, it involves poking a pin into a small, sealed pinhole on the rear of the product to release the internal components.
The second concept is a vacuum mechanism. It involves placing the product into a vacuum, causing closed cell foams and air-sealed features within it to expand and bust the external housing open.
Third, there is a piston mechanism that works by pushing a piston through a cap on the bottom of a device and forcing all of the internal components upwards until they emerge through the top.
The first concept includes a pin-triggered release mechanism
The final concept involves using UV glue – a type of adhesive that deactivates under ultraviolet light. In this concept, the product is placed into a specially lit chamber to release the clamshell construction.
The Un-Made project was led by Eddie Hamilton, a senior industrial designer at Seymourpowell, who was driven to make the work after researching what electric toothbrush to buy for himself.
“Inevitably I went for the cheap one, at which point Amazon smugly pointed out they’d sold 10k+ of that model last month alone,” said Hamilton.
Another mechanism uses a vacuum to burst open the product’s external housing
“As an industrial designer, I spend time obsessing over the product I’m working on, typically thinking of it in isolation,” he added.
“But one thing I occasionally fail to remember or adequately picture is the true scale of that product once manufactured. 10,000 units sold per month seems vast.”
Using Amazon’s bestsellers list, Hamilton ascertained that fabric shavers, steam irons, wireless doorbells, wireless computer mice, digital tyre inflators and USB-C adaptors were all items selling in their thousands each month, at a price of less than £20.
While designing products so they can be repaired is important, the associated expense may not be something that customers can justify for small items sold at this price point, Hamilton said.
“Even if we change societal attitudes, the bottom line is whether you should open that cheap toothbrush to replace a failing battery when you only paid £24.99 for it two years ago,” he said.
“I’m optimistic for some product categories to get the ball rolling, namely expensive and bulky items. But I’m also a realist that we need alternative strategies adjacent to repair. This is where we must design for disassembly.”
In Hamilton’s view, disassembly and recycling is a worthy “next best option” to repair for cheaper objects, as it keeps the materials in a circular material flow.
The piston mechanism disassembles a product by pushing its components up and out
The Un-Made design team took inspiration from Agency of Design’s Design Out Waste project, which looked at three strategies for keeping a toaster out of landfill. But they particularly wanted to explore just how efficient the disassembly process could be made through automation.
The cheaper and easier the process, they say, the more motivation there is for companies to pursue this approach and recover the components and materials inside their devices.
“A huge part of the reason e-waste ends up in landfill is because of product complexity and the inherent challenges involved in their disassembly,” Seymourpowell lead designer Alex Pearce told Dezeen.
“To date, because e-waste has been considered too time-consuming and costly to disassemble – there has been no (commercial) incentive strong enough to make it a viable option.”
The fourth Un-Made concept uses UV light to dissolve the glue holding the device together
The materials inside even cheap devices are valuable, Pearce points out, particularly when there are supply shortages or when it comes to rare-earth minerals.
“When you consider that more gold exists within a ton of e-waste than within a ton of gold ore dug from the ground, a straightforward economic imperative becomes clear for companies who are able to recover and reuse these materials,” said Pearce.
Seymourpowell imagines disassembly taking place either at the manufacturer’s facilities following a take-back procedure, or potentially at a public recycling centre if disassembly processes have been sufficiently standardised.
The London-based studio is known for its innovative product and transport designs, as well as concepts that challenge current norms. Recent projects from the studio have included the two-in-one reusable Bottlecup and a spaceship cabin for Virgin Galactic.
Design research agency FranklinTill has compiled a list of principles to help designers, makers and brands avoid greenwashing when sourcing textiles.
By making it easier to identify textiles that have a greater positive impact on people and planet, FranklinTill hopes to enable a shift towards regenerative materials.
“We can only move towards a regenerative approach to textiles by understanding the full lifecycle of our materials,” said co-founder FranklinTill Caroline Till.
“As designers, makers, brands and manufacturers, we need to think of materials not as static and linear, but as dynamic, evolving systems, to holistically consider the full impact to the wider ecosystem they are a part of.”
FranklinTill has curated an exhibition setting out its nine principles
The defining characteristic of regenerative materials, according to Till, is that they restore and nourish the ecosystems they are part of.
“Sustainability, by its very definition, is all about maintaining the status quo, while regeneration seeks to actively heal and put back better,” she said.
FranklinTill first unveiled its nine principles of regenerative design in an exhibition at the Heimtextil trade fair in Frankfurt in January, with a second show planned for the Techtextil fair in April.
In an online exclusive, we are also unveiling them here. Read on to see all nine, with captions written by FranklinTill and examples of material innovation in practice:
Designer Fernando Laposse works with local communities in Mexico to process sisal, a fibrous material made from agave leaves, which he turns into hairy furniture
Enriching Communities
“To go beyond sustainability and become regenerative, we must focus on both the social and the environmental impact of production.”
“This means spotlighting how materials are made and by whom, looking to improve livelihoods with better pay, working conditions and future prospects.”
British manufacturer Ponda produces BioPuff, an insulating fibre filler material, using bulrush plants grown on natural wetlands
Replenishing the Land
“Focused on high yields with an over-reliance on pesticides and water, modern industrial farming damages land.”
“Regenerative farming works holistically to reverse this, rebuilding organic soil matter and sequestering carbon in soil, wetlands and trees, retaining water and reducing the use of artificial pesticides and fertilisers.”
Lifestyle brand Norlha creates apparel and homewares from yak khullu wool, which is handcrafted by nomad families on the Tibetan Plateau
Preserving Heritage
“Many indigenous practices are regenerative by nature, working with the land and local communities.”
“By acknowledging and celebrating the value of cultural heritage and craftsmanship and learning from its ecological wisdom, we can protect valuable skills and knowledge from being lost to technology and globalisation.”
British textile brand Climafibre produces fabrics from sunflowers, a species that can be grown with minimal intervention, fertilisers or watering
Restoring Biodiversity
“Regenerative practices must take a multispecies approach to encouraging biodiversity.”
“Acknowledging the threat of extinction, addressing the causes of loss, and reviving habitats for diverse plants and wildlife aids ecological restoration.”
Designer Charlotte Werth has developed a fabric printing process that uses bacteria to create pigments
Biological Fabrication
“The convergence of science and design offers huge potential for new materials, from living microbial systems to synthesising nature’s regenerative powers.”
“Growing and extracting next-generation materials using innovative, highly productive processes can create plentiful resources from minimal input.”
US-based Keel Labs produces Kelsun, a seaweed-based yarn, using an abundant polymer found in kelp
Naturally Abundant
“Highly productive, resilient raw materials that grow with little human intervention offer naturally high yields, strengthen soils and capture carbon.”
“These abundant, versatile crops could help move the focus away from traditional natural material fibres that require high levels of water, pesticides or fertilisers.”
Circularity is built into all of the design and manufacturing processes for Tarkett’s Desso carpet tiles
Reclaiming Material
“Extracting raw materials, making products, then discarding them and their byproducts is contributing to the global waste problem.”
“By putting useful waste streams back into production, we can better utilise existing resources and avoid waste altogether.”
Haelixa is bringing transparency to material supply chains by applying distinct DNA codes to raw materials, using a customised spraying system
Radical Transparency
“By using science and technology to create tools and processes that capture and record data along supply chains, we can understand the social and environmental impact of the materials we consume.”
“Encrypting materials helps brands track their footprints and life cycles, and communicate this information to customers in a meaningful, trustworthy and accessible way.”
Dutch designer Sanne Visser uses traditional rope-making techniques to turn human hair into handspun yarns
Cultivating Localism
“By supporting the local sourcing, production and consumption of materials, we can avoid globalised transportation and reduce carbon footprints.”
“Focusing on availability, seasonality and resourcefulness means embracing non-standardisation, often improving local environments as well as extracting from them.”
Norwegian studio Snøhetta has teamed up with lighting brand Ateljé Lyktan to create Superdupertube, an office lamp made from extruded hemp and sugarcane bioplastic.
The design is a contemporary update of Ateljé Lyktan‘s Supertube – an office light from the 1970s made from extruded aluminium.
The Superdupertube is a modern take on the Supertube lamp
“[The Supertube] had finished production in 2010 or something like that, so it was iconic but sort of forgotten,” Snøhetta partner Jenny B Osuldsen told Dezeen. “And it’s a tube. It’s not rocket science but it is what you need for a smart lamp in an office.”
“We really loved it and think it has a lot of possibilities, so we wanted to upgrade it to a new level,” she added.
It is made from hemp and can be industrially composted. Photo by Ateljé Lyktan
The extrusion technique for the original lamp was developed in the 1960s, and Snøhetta and Ateljé Lyktan decided to create a lamp that would nod to the original design.
However, the aim was to lower the carbon footprint of the lamp by choosing the most sustainable material possible.
Snøhetta and Ateljé Lyktan chose to use hemp as the material is renewable and durable
The studios played around with multiple different materials before settling on the hemp bioplastic, which was used to form Snøhetta’s first office lighting design.
Snøhetta and Ateljé Lyktan first worked together on The 7th Room, a charred-timber cabin suspended among the treetops in northern Sweden, for which they also collaborated on the lighting design.
The lighting features twisted louvres. Photo by Ateljé Lyktan
“When we were doing The 7th Room project up in northern Sweden, everything was in pine and there were lots of pine cones,” Osuldsen said.
“We wanted to find a product or material that isn’t used for anything else, so we started testing the use of pine cones by grinding them, but it didn’t work.”
“The fibres in the cones are too short,” said Ateljé Lyktan product director Malin Gadd. “We also tried using coffee grounds but they are even shorter, so we realised quite quickly that we needed fibres that are long and strong.”
“That’s where the hemp fibres come into the picture,” she added.
Snøhetta and Ateljé Lyktan sourced the hemp used for the lights from the Netherlands, as the quality of the hemp from Swedish farmers “wasn’t quite there yet”, according to Gadd.
Its shape is both extruded and injection-moulded
The hemp is mixed with a polylactic acid (PLA) bioplastic derived from sugarcane, alongside wood cellulose and different minerals to create a fossil- and gas-free composite.
The material is then extruded to create the main body of the lamp, which also comprises injection-moulded louvres and side covers. To add to the organic feel of the light, its electric cables are covered with linen fabric.
“Hemp is an old cultural plant and it’s very easy to renew [by growing more],” Osuldsen said. “And it’s very durable.”
Linen fabric covers the electric cable. Photo by Ateljé Lyktan
The Superdupertube can be composted in an industrial composter or recycled and ground down into pellets to create more lamps.
However, this currently requires owners to send the lamps back to the producer, as the material cannot be processed in regular recycling centres.
Using the hemp bioplastic reduces the lamp’s carbon footprint by over 50 per cent compared to traditional aluminium variants, according to Snøhetta and Ateljé Lyktan.
The Superdupertube comes in a natural colour. Photo by Ateljé Lyktan
The dimmable Superdupertube features twisted louvres – an architectural detail that helps the light feel softer by angling the glare away.
“That’s why it’s a perfect workspace luminaire, it’s adapted to be better for the person sitting working and it’s also totally unique – it doesn’t exist on the market,” Gadd said.
The Superdupertube, which comes in four different lengths, has an organic beige colour with a natural pattern from the hemp and other ingredients.
It is the first time Snøhetta has designed an office lamp
“We didn’t really know how it would look,” Osuldsen said. “The material is the colour of the hemp. And, of course, there’s probably something from the sugarcane because it’s heated up. It’s burnt sugar in a way.”
“So we get this specific colour and that also means that all of them will be a little bit different,” she added. “It’s all about the crops; if it’s a wet year or a dry year, the humidity in the material will be a little bit different. That’s why it’s sort of alive.”
Other recent Snøhetta projects include a glass-lined library in China designed to look like a forest and a hexagonal paving system for urban landscapes.
The photography is by Jonas Lindstrom unless otherwise stated.
If you’re hosting an exhibition or event during 3 Days of Design, you can feature in Dezeen Events Guide’s digital guide to the Danish festival.
Taking place in Copenhagen from 12 to 14 June 2024, the festival includes a programme of exhibitions, product launches, open showrooms, talks and other events.
This year, the 11th iteration of the festival focuses on the theme Dare to Dream and presents furniture, accessories, textiles, surfaces, workplace design, outdoor products and material innovations.
Dezeen’s digital guide will spotlight the key events and brands taking place across the festival’s 13 design districts.
Get listed in Dezeen’s digital guide to 3 Days of Design
Get in touch with the Dezeen Events Guide team at [email protected] to book your listing or to discuss a wider partnership with Dezeen.
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Standard listings cost £100 and include the event name, date and location details plus a website link. These listings will also feature up to 50 words of text about the event.
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For more information about partnering with us to help amplify your event, contact the team at [email protected].
About Dezeen Events Guide
Dezeen Events Guide is our guide to the best architecture and design events taking place across the world each year.
The guide is updated weekly and includes virtual events, conferences, trade fairs, major exhibitions and design weeks.
For more details on inclusion in Dezeen Events Guide, including in our guide to 3 Days of Design, email [email protected].
Swiss furniture brand Vitra will prioritise reducing the environmental impact of its existing lines through material innovation, CEO Nora Fehlbaum tells Dezeen in this interview.
One of the industry’s best known and most influential manufacturers, Vitra‘s collections include iconic pieces such as Eames plastic shell chairs and Panton chairs.
Like its peers, the brand is under increasing pressure to reduce the ecological footprint of its operations in the face of worsening climate change.
Nora Fehlbaum spoke to Dezeen at the Vitra Campus in Weil Am Rhein
Speaking to Dezeen at the Vitra Campus in Weil Am Rhein, Germany, Fehlbaum suggested that the company’s heritage as a high-end, design-focused furniture brand is inherently aligned with sustainability.
“Vitra’s greatest contribution to sustainability is its products with an above-average service life, which omit everything superfluous,” she told Dezeen.
“Our roots in modern design would allow nothing else.”
However, she claimed Vitra is “doing everything we can with all the means we have” to become more sustainable.
The Álvaro Siza-designed Factory at the Vitra Campus has been partially converted to accommodate a new Vitra Circle store (also top)
“Everybody at Vitra has understood our environmental mission,” she said. “We don’t have a sustainability officer – everybody has taken it as their own.”
Vitra’s stated goal is to be “a net-positive company based on all the indicators of its ecological footprint by 2030”.
It has a long way to go, with the company’s most recent sustainability report published in 2022 stating that its total emissions for the year were equivalent to nearly 141,000 tonnes of CO2.
Eames shell chairs now made from recycled plastic
The brand’s sustainability strategy is chiefly focused on its popular existing products, Fehlbaum said.
“We have the biggest impact if we change the products that we sell the most of already, rather than inventing one single sustainable product,” she argued.
“At Vitra, a product is never final, but continues to evolve.”
The Vitra Circle store refurbishes and sells second hand Vitra products
As of January this year, the shells of the Eames plastic chairs manufactured by Vitra are now made exclusively from recycled post-consumer plastic.
“[The Eames shell chair] is probably the most iconic, most copied chair out there – and it won’t be available in virgin material,” said Fehlbaum.
The switch means the shells have a speckled finish that differs from the originals, but Fehlbaum is satisfied with this “recycled aesthetic”.
“It’s a different aesthetic, and of course we hope the consumer gets used to – and maybe even comes to love – this new aesthetic,” she said.
“That’s a risk that we’re taking and that we’re willing to take.”
The RE plastic shells are noticeably more speckled (on the right) than the original plastic shell (on the left)
It follows earlier switches of products and parts from virgin to recycled plastic, starting with Barber Osgerby’s Tip Ton chair in 2020.
A number of accessories like Arik Levy’s Toolbox and Konstantin Grcic’s Locker Box have since followed. The entire HAL chair family, designed by Jasper Morrison, now also have their shells manufactured using recycled plastic.
The recycled plastic is taken from household recycling obtained through the German garbage collection programme Gelber Sack (Yellow Bag).
“Utilising this raw material instead of petroleum-based primary plastics generates fewer climate-damaging emissions and less primary energy consumption,” Fehlbaum claimed.
The role of recycling in solving the world’s plastic pollution crisis is contested among designers.
Some, including designer Richard Hutten and Belgian curator Jan Boelen, argue that big brands are using recycling to create an illusion of change while continuing to use virgin plastics.
Others, among them the CEO of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation Andrew Morlet, argue that durable, recyclable plastics can form part of a circular economy.
Many recycled plastic products involve the use of some virgin plastic or additive substances that then complicate or inhibit their own recyclability.
Vitra said its RE product, used for the Eames shells, does not contain any virgin plastic and can be fully recycled at the end of the product’s life thanks to the use of technical fillers, like glass fibres, rather than any additives that prevent onwards recycling.
Vitra products are available to purchase at discounted rates at the new Circle Store
Another sustainability initiative is Vitra’s Circle Stores, which sell used furniture and accessories by Vitra and Artek, such as sample products and exhibition pieces, with prices depending on the condition of the products.
All products are tested for functionality and repaired if necessary so that a renewed product warranty can be granted.
The first Circle Store opened in Amsterdam in 2017 in response to questions from customers about second-hand Vitra products, with a second in Brussels.
A third recently “moved” from Frankfurt and opened in an adapted space at the Álvaro Siza-designed Vitra Campus factory building, with a service and repair area where customers can bring their products to receive a new lease of life.
“With the Circle Store, we can offer our environmentally conscious clients an even more environmentally conscious choice: namely that of a second-hand product,” said Fehlbaum.
Absence in Milan “really wasn’t such a huge deal”
The brand has also taken steps to rewild parts of the Vitra Campus. The Piet Oudolf garden was completed in 2020 and Vitra is working with Belgian landscape architect Bas Smets on a masterplan plan for fewer roads and more native trees on the site.
Fehlbaum acknowledges that some may be sceptical about the sustainability work it is doing within the context of widespread greenwashing.
“It’s impossible to get through this jungle of messaging,” she said.
“How do we talk about it to make sure that it is clear how thoroughly and authentically we’re really tackling this?”
Some other furniture brands have also reduced their presence at design fairs amid concerns about the significant emissions associated with shipping products around the world for temporary showstands.
Vitra has historically had a significant presence in Milan during the Italian city’s annual design week in April, but was noticeably absent in 2023.
However, Fehlbaum said that although she was asked about this a lot “it really wasn’t such a huge deal”.
“For us, it makes a lot of sense to use what we already have,” she said.
“We have the Vitra Campus and it’s not so far from Milan. We prefer to use and invest in something that can be around for five or 10 years rather than spending a lot of energy and resources on something that after five days we’re going to have to break down.”
It is yet to be seen if the brand will return to Milan design week this year.
“The way we think about it [showing at design fairs like Milan] is never black or white,” Fehlbaum explained.
“There might be a moment where we say Milan is exactly the right place at the right moment to talk about something, and then maybe we’ll be there.”
The Eames Plastic Chair RE was photographed at the Eames house, Pacific Palisades, California. Photo by the Eames Foundation
Vitra was founded in 1950 by Nora Fehlbaum’s grandparents Willi and Erika Fehlbaum and has since grown to become one of the industry’s leading names.
Nora Fehlbaum succeeded her uncle, Rolf Fehlbaum, as CEO in 2016 and identifies improving the brand’s sustainability as her key mission.
“There is still a long way to go before reaching our environmental goals,” she acknowledged. “Things need to be tested, mistakes must be made, and in the process the company might sometimes overlook an important aspect or underestimate the impact of an activity.”
This is now a central part of the brand’s function as an industry leader, Fehlbaum suggests.
“The designer landscape has changed. In the past, it was a lot about iconic design and breaking the mould, building your own brand and your studio – new things – and now, the students that are graduating come with their own environmental mission,” she said.
“I see our role, together with these people and with the right suppliers and innovative companies, to find solutions that are, for lack of a better term, sustainable in the longer term.”
Other interviews recently published on Dezeen include the Kvadrat CEO saying sustainability is “not making our lives easier” and Iittala creative director Janni Vepsäläinen sharing her goal to help the brand “remain culturally relevant for another 100 years”.
The photography is courtesy of Vitra unless otherwise stated.
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American interior designer, fashion influencer and “geriatric starlet” Iris Apfel has passed away at the age of 102.
The death of the multidisciplinary creative, who was recognised for her flamboyant personal style, was announced on her Instagram account with an image of Apfel in her trademark oversized glasses.
Apfel, who worked in the interiors and fashion industries throughout her career, shot to international fame in her 80s and 90s after New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited a show of her eclectic clothes and accessories in 2005.
Born Iris Barrel in 1921 in Queens, Apfel studied art history at New York University and art at the University of Wisconsin.
After graduating, she worked for fashion magazine Women’s Wear Daily before interning for interior designer Elinor Johnson.
Together with her late husband Carl Apfel, whom she married in 1948, she set up the brand Old World Weavers – a company that specialised in striking textiles informed by things found on the Apfels’ travels.
Under Old World Weavers, the duo completed high-profile projects such as restoring the White House interiors for nine presidents including Harry Truman and Bill Clinton.
The designer became a visiting lecturer at the University of Texas in 2011, where she taught fashion students about textiles and crafts.
In later life, Apfel became a staple of the fashion industry. In 2018, toy manufacturer Mattel created a Barbie doll in the designer’s image, although it was not for sale. At the age of 97, she signed a modelling contract with IMG Models.
Apfel playfully called herself a “geriatric starlet” and described the prospect of retirement as “a fate worse than death” shortly after turning 100.
Following the news of her passing, designers around the world paid tribute to Apfel’s legacy. “Iris Apfel has become a world-famous fashion icon because of her incredible talent not only as an artist but as an influencer,” said fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger.
The photography is by Ron Adar courtesy of Shutterstock.
A disaster-proof chandelier from Lebanon and a towering sand dune-style stone installation feature in Arab Design Now, the main exhibition at the inaugural Design Doha biennial.
Arab Design Now was curated by Rana Beiruti to capture the spirit of contemporary design across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the curator told Dezeen ahead of the opening of the first Design Doha.
Set within the Qatari capital’s M7 building, the design biennial draws together a range of collectible design and installations.
Selected works from 74 participants paid homage to the MENA region’s “extremely harsh and unique geography” and investigated the “use of materials as a guiding principle,” explained Beiruti.
Here are 10 of Dezeen’s highlights from Arab Design Now, which is on display in Doha until early August.
Sites – New Sites by Studio Anne Holtrop
Bahrain- and Amsterdam-based architect Anne Holtrop has designed a cluster of large-scale mobiles made from vast slabs of lumpy resin.
Holtrop took casts of a series of manmade and natural sites that he found across Qatar to create the textured pieces, which hang from bearing mechanisms and can be manually rotated by visitors to produce continuously moving formations.
Constellations 2.0: Object. Light. Consciousness by Abeer Seikaly
Over 5,000 pieces of Murano glass were woven together by Jordanian-Palestinian designer Abeer Seikaly to create this chandelier, which combines Bedouin weaving practices from Jordan with traditional Venetian glassmaking techniques.
Brass and stainless steel were also integrated into the lighting, made flexible by the glass mesh.
Once illuminated, the sculptural piece creates dramatic light patterns that nod to a starry night sky seen from the Badia desert, according to Seikaly.
House Between a Jujube Tree and a Palm Tree by Civil Architecture
Kuwait and Bahrain-based office Civil Architecture has designed a looming fibreglass roof proposal for a majlis – the traditional term for an Arabic gathering space.
“It’s a 1:1 model of a roof of an actual house that we designed in Bahrain,” studio co-founder Hamed Bukhamseen told Deezen.
Supported by steel and suspended from tension cables, the majlis features openings designed to accommodate tall trees and was created to explore the “symbiotic but blurred” relationship between indoor and outdoor settings.
Photo courtesy of Design Doha
Nubia, Hathor and Gros Guillaume Stool by Omar Chakil
French-Egyptian-Lebanese designer Omar Chakil was informed by his father’s homeland of Egypt when he chose alabaster onyx to create this monolithic shelving, a bulbous coffee table and a stool that glides across the floor on wheels.
Taking cues from ancient practices, Chakil carved the rounded furniture from raw blocks of the material, which was sanded down over time using water rather than covered in varnish – something that the designer said had became common in Egypt, especially when making “cheap” souvenirs.
“The whole idea of the collection was to use Egyptian alabaster, which was a healing stone,” Chakil told Dezeen.
“The pharaohs used [the material], then it transformed it over time. It lost its soul. So I tried to put it in the contemporary context by using the shapes that healing emotions would take – so they are round and soft, even though they are very heavy,” he added.
“I see that people are afraid to, but I want them to touch the furniture.”
Tiamat by AAU Anastas
Palestinian architecture office AAU Anastas is presenting Tiamat, a dune-shaped installation that forms part of the studio’s ongoing project, Stone Matters, which explores the potential of combining historical stone building techniques with modern technologies to encourage the use of structural stone.
Positioned for visitors to walk through, the installation is a towering structure made of stone sourced from Bethlehem and informed by the Gothic-style architecture found across Palestine, Syria and Lebanon.
According to AAU Anastas, the light, sound reverberations and climate control within Tiamat’s internal space is unique to stone construction.
Clay in Context by Sama El Saket
Jordan-born architect and ceramicist Sama El Saket took cues from her native landscape when creating this “taxonomy of Jordanian clays”.
The result is a set of spindle bottle-style vessels, each made of a different natural clay found across Jordan. This gives the pieces their distinctive colours, textures and character.
“These are all natural clays with no pigments added,” El Saket told Dezeen. “The colours are attributed to the different minerals that are found within the region. Some are sandier, some are rockier.”
The designer noted that while Jordan features an abundance of clay deposits and a rich history of ceramic production, today most Jordanian clay is imported.
Photo by Sabine Saadeh
Light Impact by Fabraca Studios
Lebanese industrial design brand Fabraca Studios has created Light Impact, a solid aluminium lighting fixture that was designed as an alternative chandelier, resembling durable ropes.
The piece was made to replace a glass chandelier that shattered in the aftermath of the 2020 Beiruit explosion, which destroyed a large part of Lebanon’s capital city.
Light Impact is defined by “flexible characteristics designed to withstand another disaster,” studio founder Samer Saadeh told Dezeen. He added that the piece, which includes internal brass components, was designed as an ode to Beirut’s adaptability and resilience.
Eleven by Sahel Alhiyari
Eleven is a cluster of tall fluted terracotta columns by Jordanian architect Sahel Alhiyari that were made through moulding and forming rather than traditional cutting and carving.
The architect handcrafted the segments, which are vertically stacked, using a similar technique to pottery-making,
“As you twist and turn the material, it creates all of this stuff,” Alhiyari told Dezeen. The designer explained that the columns were deliberately created to celebrate imperfections, despite referencing classical architecture.
Sediments by Talin Hazbar
UAE-based Syrian designer Talin Hazbar is featuring her Sediments project, which previously gained recognition at Dubai Design Week.
The work consists of blocky seating made from fishing ropes and fishing cage ropes extracted from the Persian Gulf with the assistance of the Dubai Voluntary Diving Team.
Also made up of recycled rubber grains, the heavily textured seating was created to serve as a reminder of how we might attempt to clean up damaged coastlines, according to Hazbar.
Whispers from the Deep by T Sakhi
Lebanese-Polish sisters Tessa and Tara El Sakhi of the studio T Sakhi combined discarded metal salvaged from factories in Veneto, Italy, with Murano glass to create amorphous glassware that takes cues from underwater sea creatures.
These pieces were arranged atop dramatic shelving inside the elevator connecting the first and second floors of the Arab Design Now exhibition.
The result is a playful installation that draws together the Venetian lagoon and Lebanese glassblowing traditions.
The photography is by Edmund Sumner unless stated otherwise.
Arab Design Now takes place at Design Doha from 24 February to 5 August 2024 at M7 in Doha, Qatar. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.
If you’re hosting an event during NYCxDesign, you can get listed in Dezeen Events Guide’s digital guide to the festival, which highlights the key events taking place across New York City’s five boroughs.
NYCxDesign runs from 16 to 23 May 2024 and features hundreds of events including installations, exhibitions, fairs, tours, open studios and product launches.
One of the largest events taking place during the eight-day programme is the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) and WantedDesign Manhattan, located at the Javits Center from 19 to 21 May 2024. Each year the fair sees 10,000 visitors from the architecture, design and retail fields.
With 2024 marking the festival’s 12th anniversary, NYCxDesign aims for its events to target themes of sustainability, inclusivity and diversity while exploring a range of design mediums.
Get listed in Dezeen’s digital NYCxDesign guide
Get in touch with the Dezeen Events Guide team at [email protected] to book your listing or to discuss a wider partnership with Dezeen.
There are three types of listing available:
Standard listings cost £125 ($160) and include the event name, date and location details plus a website link. These listings will feature up to 50 words of text about the event.
Enhanced listings cost £175 ($225) and include all of the above plus an image at the top of the listing’s page and a preview image on the Dezeen Events Guide homepage. These listings will also feature up to 100 words of text about the event.
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For more details about partnering with us to help amplify your event, contact the team at [email protected].
About Dezeen Events Guide
Dezeen Events Guide is our guide to the best architecture and design events taking place across the world each year.
The guide is updated weekly and includes events, conferences, trade fairs, major exhibitions and design weeks.
