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3Triflow Tap

4Naval Brass

5Beat Vessel

objects 6Lace Fence

7Timeless Objects

exploring the potential of copper in design world

issue 3 November 09www.copperindesign.org

copperindesign

objects

furnishing

objects

art

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8Minimalux

9Bronze Poly Chair

10100 Piazze

11Elemental Spa

furnishing 12Habibi Tables

objects

objects

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furnishing

Zaha Hadid Triflow Tap

The new Triflow tap, designed by the star architect Zaha Hadid, takes inspiration from the fluid movement of water. The design is a formal expression of the continuous flow of liquid - merging the spout, body and handle of the tap in a seamless trajectory of curvilinear geometries. Already unique to the three-way Triflow tap is the technology woven effortlessly into its design – namely the extra internal tube that allows treated drinking water to be delivered through a separate waterway, avoiding contamination from the hot and cold tap water. Hidden within the Zaha Hadid design is a highly sophisticated manufacturing process that has never before been used for a tap. The revolutionary brass shape employs the latest production methods and a unique ceramic coring process, resulting in a tap that is as much a piece of art as it is a kitchen or bathroom fixture.

3objects

Marcel Wanders Naval Brass

Naval Brass was created by Dutch designer Marcel Wanders for Moooi. The collection has a special lacquered coating that is designed to wear over time to slowly accentuate the decorative contours and let the natural, radiant beauty of the brass shine through. With this delicate and patient process Naval Brass offers a unique quality unequaled by any other accessory and puts the responsibility of decorative design firmly in your hands.

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Tom Dixon Beat Vessel

Named Beat for their hand-beaten production method, Tom Dixon’s series of vessels is quickly becoming an iconic part of his oeuvre. Using traditional, rapidly-vanishing skills from Indian master craftsmen, the collection of vessels is made from hand-beaten, smooth, unpolished brass. The water carrying vessels that are still carried on heads all over India provided the first inspiration for this series of objects. The impressive show of light reflected from the unpolished brass shade makes the vessels ideal for any domestic space. At once exotic and indicative of Dixon’s vernacular, they represent design fusion at it’s best.

5objects

Joep Verhoeven Lace Fence

This project takes an everyday, factory-produced product that performs an important function yet is rarely considered, and reinvents it as a lovingly-crafted object. The concept represents a reversal of the usual process of industrialisation, in which the culture of hand-made objects is gradually usurped by industrially manufactured products. It also asks why notions of beauty cannot be applied to banal objects.Lace Fence was produced by young Dutch designer Joep Verhoeven as his graduate project while studying at Design Academy Eindhoven. The idea is based on the anonymous chainlink security fences that are ubiquitous on industrial estates and sports grounds around the world. These are usually made of PVC-coated steel wire, which is woven into a continuous mesh by a process akin to giant-scale knitting, and then erected on posts.Working with plastic-coated copper wire – which is more malleable than steel – Verhoeven wove intricate patterns, inspired by traditional Dutch lace-making techniques, into the fence, creating a delicate screen of foliage and flowers. Thus, a product that is a symbol of privacy, denial and even paranoia becomes something celebratory and strangely domestic.

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Boym PartnersTimeless Objects

New York designers Constantin and Laurene Boym have coated a selection of discarded objects to make them look and feel like bronze sculptures.Amidst a flurry of new trends, yearly promoted by mass media, there exists an often-voiced desire for timeless everlasting values, for design described as permanent and archetypal.Their new collection Timeless Objects attempts to make the pieces as timeless as ancient bronze monuments.Inside each piece there is “a found object”: either a disposable item or an anonymous thing culled from the mundane texture of our everyday life. Once the special treatment is applied, the familiar shapes start to look and feel like bronze sculpture.Trivial objects suddenly look permanent and essential. Are these pieces brand new, or were they made long ago? One imagines objects that defy time and obsolescence, things that withstand fluctuations of trends and style.

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Mark HolmesMinimalux

Defined as a luxury collection with a stripped-down aesthetic, Minimalux by Mark Holmes utilises just a few basic but effective elements as the ingredients of its operational structure and product design. It is a uniquely contrasting combination of opposites, resulting in an identity that is as rigidly formal as it is preciously adorned.The philosophy is clearly identifiable in this first collection of products that Holmes has designed, all of which effortlessly combine simple, primary, solid brass forms, together with mirror polished finishing. The variations of cubes and cylinders present wide but harmonious extremes of form and finish.They function as items for the desk, including pen holders and paperweights; items for the table, including salt shakers and egg cups, and items for general use including a series of pots and containers. The objects themselves have a lasting practical and material value, defining their potential as modern day heirlooms and providing relevance and longevity for future generations.

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Max LambBronze Poly Chair

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Max Lamb’s chair designs suggest an aggressiveness that is characteristic of the atavistic spirit in design today. In stark contrast to recent ethereal and romanticised design, or designs that transfer directly from computer to machine manufacture without human intervention, Lamb laboriously chisels, buries, grows and smelts materials into rugged and bold forms. His Bronze Poly Chair is a recent design that involves hand-carving a polystyrene chair and then casting it in bronze. Lamb calls the casting process “lost foam”, as it is similar to the lost wax technique but substitutes a wax original for one of expanded polystyrene.The Bronze Poly Chair combines two processes that he explored in previous projects – his Pewter Stool that was cast directly into a hand-carved mould on a sandy beach in Cornwall, and his Polystyrene Chair that is carved from a solid block of low density expanded polystyrene (98% air) and then coated in rubber.Each Bronze Poly Chair is hand-sculpted in polystyrene foam and then buried in sand ready to be sacrificed.Ingots of bronze are heated to over 1100 degrees C and the ‘red hot’ molten metal is poured through the sprue into the sand, consuming the delicate foam and investing the hidden cavity in bronze. Over two hours of waiting and the solid bronze replica of the foam object is broken from the sand.

furnishing

Fabio Novembre100 Piazze

The 100 Piazze project by Italian designer Fabio Novembre is composed of eight silver-plated brass trays, reproducing the layouts and facades of several Italian places. The designer works on the theme of recollection and collective imagination. Fabio Novembre doesn’t cite, he invents. Even in this project, from love of and in tribute to Italian architectural grandeur comes, as a divertissement, an invention. Reduced in scale, the architecture of Italy’s most beautiful places becomes a centrepiece, and the centrepiece looks like a real architectural mockup.A trophy, midway between kitsch and nostalgia. Recollections of Rome and piazza della Scala, Turin and piazza San Carlo, Lucca and piazza dell’Anfiteatro, Milan and piazza della Scala, of Florence and even the smaller, less-known Palmanova and Venaria Reale.

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Sieger DesignElemental Spa

The theme of Elemental Spa, designed by Sieger and produced by Dornbracht. is the archaic and the original: the element water changes its surroundings. It can make a place unique. That is why Elemental Spa makes water the centre of attention. It becomes the starting point for personal and shared rituals in physical and mental cleansing, and makes the bathroom a refuge for the body and the soul.The fittings, designed in the form of bodies of water, stand for various cleansing and relaxation rituals; an area to wash your feet even makes reference to religious rites. Water is the focal point of the bathroom; in time, it deliberately leaves traces behind on the archaic-looking, oxidised copper or olive wood, each of which tells stories of use and the past.

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Philipp MainzerHabibi Tables

The Habibi collection, designed by the young German artist Philipp Mainzer and produced by E15, is reminiscent of ornately detailed oriental tea services. The tray in combination with the base made from brass can be used as an independent side table, and is a natural development of the tray on its own.With generous diameters and optional heights Habibi offers elegant side tables in brass, copper and stainless steel that are a special feature in any environment. Each tray is spun and polished by hand. Untreated by chemicals, natural oxidation processes create a beautiful patina over time, unless interrupted by applying conven-tional metal polishes. The tray is perfectly complemented by the coffee table, which also provides numerous other combination possibilities itself.

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