Sculpture And Technology

This British designer offers Domus a preview of the contents of the important exhibition that the Centre Pompidou is dedicating to his work: not a retrospective, but the opportunity to observe his body of work immersed in a display designed to interconnect with the “exposed industrial truth” of the building by Rogers and Piano, 40 years later.

- Ross Lovegrove

After showing the work of Ettore Sottsass, the Pompidou’s perspective was to select a designer who has worked through the transition from the analogue to the digital. It wanted someone who from the outset of his career has looked to innovate and accomplish a consistently progressive view of industrial design; someone who embraces principles that will help define the profession’s new position in the 21st century; a designer who uses technology to humanise and embed art into design, who explores sculptural forms with emotional intelligence; a designer who transcends borders and illuminates connections between art and design, materials and science, evolutionary principles, the digital realm and ecology. This is why the exhibition is called “Convergence”. The Centre Pompidou considers architecture and design art forms that have great social and universal impact on our consciousness. This is why it makes highly researched exhibitions on architects such as Frank Gehry and Le Corbusier for example. The leading curators at the Pompidou – Marie-Ange Brayer, the former director of the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain du Centre, and Frédéric Migayrou, who is a professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture in London – are both highly respected champions of digital design and architecture and I believe that to them, my work qualifies as a bridge across these fields, uniting them with a coherent philosophy. It’s not a retrospective, so for me it’s really about laying out zones that informally represent defining principles: Organic Essentialism, Ecology and Digital.