Luminaires et sculpture habillés de chaussettes en fils de laine multicolores imaginés par les designers américains Egawa+Zbryk
À propos (via Charlotte Street Foundation): « The design team of Rie Egawa and Burgess Zbryk has received international honors for their playful objects and elegant furniture designs. Inspired by the work of modernist visionaries such as Alexander Calder, Buckminster Fuller and Eero Saarinen, Egawa + Zbyrk create original pieces in a signature style that is one part homage and two parts invention.
Among Egawa + Zbyrk’s most visible and memorable designs is the Puzzle Screen, an interlocking set of twin-oblong shapes that can be stacked and re-arranged in variable dimensions. While functional as a room-divider, The Puzzle Screen is most striking for its ability to evoke optical effects: even prolonged looking does not deaden the sense that one has just happened upon a spontaneous fluttering of wings.
More recently, Egawa + Zbryk debuted the Sweater Lamp—a set of fluorescent tube lights “clothed” in a soft and brightly-colored hand-knitted cover. For the Charlotte St. exhibition, Egawa + Zbryk further developed the Sweater Lamp concept to create an eye-catching site-specific light installation for the window of Grand Arts. Like a fanciful circuitry for some unknown machine, the installation evokes both logic and sensuality through a sheathing of technology in the organic. Visitors beaconed to the installation by its warm glow and tactile quality may be surprised at the artists’ invitation to go ahead and touch it—however, in this case it is precisely Egawa and Zbryk’s aim to subvert the air of cool reserve we’ve come to expect from objects of “good design.”
Egawa + Zbryk like to stress that although they are influenced by the clean lines and direct approach of modernism, their personal strategy reverses the modernist maxim that form ought to follow function. The artists’ installation for the Charlotte St. exhibition exemplifies this thinking. Egawa describes the tubular forms of the piece as looking like “glowing alien worms or giant colorful intestines.” The ability of these delightful tubes to light up a room or a dark city block comes second, according to Egawa: “We are always more interested in aesthetics than functions.”
Photos © Egawa+Zbryk
+ Via Egawa+Zbryk
Sweater floor lamp
Sweater Skinny Box lamp
KuneKune 3
Sweater tube
