Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, Works
Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, Works
Book
This book covers the entire career, up to the point of publication, of the French product designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, including commissions for Vitra, Alessi, and Cappellini, amongst others. Ten themed chapters explore a different aspect of the Bouroullecs’ career, providing an illustrated catalogue detailing all their designs and interviews with key figures and collaborators discussing their work.
Visiting the designers’ studio was key to creating the design concept for this book. In our discussion, Ronan expressed a wish to create a book without words, inspired notably by a vintage book of Japanese craftsmanship in which objects were presented simply in an elegant emptiness on a page. This became a key inspiration for the book. We used delicate, almost transparent, off-white paper to create chapter dividers. The material is a direct reference to the Moleskine notebooks kept religiously and archived meticulously by the Bouroullecs, for whom drawing is a daily practice.
During the visit, we also photographed one of the units from the Bouroullecs’ Algue curtain. This photo, reminiscent of a botanical specimen, became the direct inspiration for the cover. In a moment of serendipitous alignment, Ronan and our studio separately mocked up the same cover layout displaying a single Algue on a black background. The final cover shows its iconic outline impressed in foil onto fibrous, tactile paper.
Publisher: Phaidon
Author: Anniina Koivu
2012
