An Eye for Beauty That Works
British industrial designer Ross Lovegrove takes a simple, practical approach to his work. “Everything I design, I experience. People ask me how I can create such a variety of things--aircraft interiors, chairs, bottles, spoons, sunglasses. I can because I have an opinion about them based on my experience using them.”
He has designed and/or collaborated on a notable list of products, including the Walkman for Sony and computers for Apple. He worked as an in-house designer for Knoll International in Paris and lately has become known for his curvilinear Go chair for Bernhardt Design, introduced last year.
“I think everything should look beautiful and work,” he said this week, while in town to introduce one of his latest ventures, the TAG Heuer eyewear collection. “I’ve developed a position within the world of organic design based on wonderful forms. I love wonderful, fluid forms, and I think everyone does. After all, there’s not a straight line on a human being.”
TAG Heuer, the Swiss watch company, allowed Lovegrove a great deal of flexibility in the design process, he says. “It took three years, with the first six months spent just looking at the shapes of people’s faces. I had to get very analytical. With anything that fits on the body, you have to take a deep view of it, since it becomes a part of you.” The detail he likes best is not one of style but of providing comfort to the wearer: “I’m particularly happy with the adjustable nose pad. These glasses can fit faces everywhere in the world.”
Made from high-pressure injection-molded metal, Lovegrove’s sunglasses are sleek and sculptural. His materials include titanium, magnesium and aluminum. “The outside is very flat because it is away from your body. Where a material comes near the body, it’s organic. So you have an inside/outside. All my work has that, although I don’t really talk about it. It’s just there. It’s a gesture to the human being,” he says. Retail prices for the glasses range from $200 to $400; they are available at Optical Fashion Center in Beverly Hills, Maison d’Optique in Studio City and Occhiali Fine Eyewear in Montecito, near Santa Barbara.
In the 1980s, Lovegrove joined the design consortium Atelier de Nimes in France, working with hotel and furniture designer Philippe Starck and architect Jean Nouvel. There he served as a design consultant to Louis Vuitton, Cacharel, Dupont and Hermes.
Returning to London In 1990, he established his own firm, Studio X, and has since won many awards, including the 2000 ID Good Design award. He was nominated 2001 Designer of the Year from Architekture & Wohnen, Hamburg, and his work is included in numerous museum collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art in New York and London’s Design Museum.
Peter Fiell, London-based co-author of “Designing the 21st Century” (Taschen, 2001), calls Ross one of the “most important designers working right now. He has pioneered a new language of design, which can be described as organic essentialism. This approach involves the development of holistic and very pure solutions that provide the most with the least.”
Or, as Lovegrove says, there is no fat on his designs. Case in point is the Go chair, which retails for just under $600 and is manufactured by North Carolina-based Bernhardt furniture makers. The chair’s use of injection-molded magnesium marks the first time the die-cast material has been used in furniture.
“We had so much trust in Ross’ vision that the design brief for the chair was a verbal one, made over lunch in London,” Jerry Helling, executive vice president of Bernhardt Design, says. “All we asked was that the chair have arms and that it should be big enough to accommodate Americans. The response to the chair has been much stronger than we had ever anticipated. Ross has an incredible mind and can envision things that most people have never even considered.”
The Go chair has quickly become a design icon and is illustrated on the cover of Fiell’s book. “It is a truly 21st century chair,” Fiell says. “Ross is materials-led and a risk taker. What I mean by this is that he pushes materials, technology, function and often aesthetics to the absolute limit in his search for groundbreaking product solutions.”
Lovegrove has also created his version of the ubiquitous water bottle in a blow-molded bottle design made from organic materials for Ty Nant, a water company in Wales. “They’re calling this the Coke bottle of the 21st century,” he says. “Other water bottles are designed to fit the machine in the factory, the truck that transports it and storage. They’re not designed for your table or for your hand. My bottle is more Leonardo da Vinci’s water studies meet Issey Miyake. That just shows you can elevate the standard of our culture with anything, even a bottle of water.”
Because of Lovegrove’s concern with ecology--which has also led him to design solar energy products--the organic properties of his water bottle are nearly as important as the aesthetic ones. “I try to deliver a level of honesty in what I do, and with that comes a beauty,” he says. “I think that in the future our things are going to become much more honest. We have to become more environmental. There is a kind of moral responsibility involved. If you’re taking a material out of the planet, you should make something of good quality with high value, intellectually and aesthetically. And if you do, you define our culture. That’s why I’m a designer, because that’s how I see it.”
