Reinventing furniture through encounters, industry and reuse by Laurent Badier
Briana BOUQUIER
Master’s student in Design, Arts & Crafts, and Industry
Jean Monnet University, Saint-Étienne, France
Master’s student in Design, Arts & Crafts, and Industry
Jean Monnet University, Saint-Étienne, France
Laurent Badier has developed a practice that lies at the intersection of design, industry and reuse. Known for reinterpreting school furniture as collectible design objects, his work is based less on a formal programme than on a succession of encounters, intuitions and accepted technical constraints.
Through his masterful use of industrial materials such as acrylic glass, entirely French manufacturing and collaborations with major industrial players, Laurent Badier questions the traditional boundaries between craftsmanship and industrial production. His approach to neo-craftsmanship is not based on a nostalgic return to traditional techniques, but on an ability to deal with contemporary economic, technological and environmental realities, while opening up new avenues around reuse, limited series and sustainable objects.
Briana BOUQUIER & Lila MITTON : Laurent Badier, you do not claim to have followed a traditional academic path, nor do you describe yourself as “self-taught”. How have your career path and successive experiences shaped your approach to design today?
Laurent BADIER : I am a designer, and it wasn’t me who decided that, it was the people who call me that. I am known for having redesigned school furniture.
I didn’t go to school. I don’t like the word ‘self-taught’ because I think it means nothing. We arrive at a situation where it’s the sum of our experience and the work we’ve done that brings us there. I’ve always made things. I’ve always sold things that didn’t exist, meaning that in the jobs I’ve done, I had to design the products, find the factories and have them manufactured. At first, it was advertising objects. I did that for about fifteen years and then I worked with artists. I was an artist’s agent and I had art galleries. I started designing furniture, and that’s what led me to do this… to create this collection today.
One of the major challenges in life is to keep learning and never stop learning, and above all, not to believe that just because you’ve learned something, you’ve arrived. There are always new technologies, new things to learn, new professions, and so on. It’s a series of experiences.
It’s about encounters, it’s about people. If there’s a partnership like the one with Bic, which we’ll probably talk about later, it’s surely because there’s a story behind it, there’s an encounter. So it’s mainly about coming up with explanations for things after the fact. Things happen because you met a certain person, a certain craftsman, a certain factory manager, and that’s what makes you want to do it…
B. B. & L. M. : Your objects often seem to arise from chance, an encounter or a technical detail. Can you tell us about the origins of your iconic chair collection and the central role played by intuition?
L. B. : The story behind my pieces, if you want the real story, well, the story behind this collection anyway, is that I didn’t want to create this collection of chairs. I wasn’t working on that, I was working on tables, wooden tables for restaurants, and I had, I don’t know how, and to this day I don’t know where it came from, this screw, an anodised metal screw, you know what that is? It’s anodised aluminium, it’s a screw, and I thought it was really pretty, and I was trying to figure out what to do with it, and I had it on my desk for two years without coming up with anything, and then one day I saw people at a trade show revamping school chairs, and I thought it was a good idea and that we could surely finish… that there was another option besides the one they had chosen.
and even at flea markets and in magazines, it was fashionable to revamp school chairs, so I looked for my version… and one day, completely by chance, I bought a chair… and when I bought it, I had the idea of putting the screw in the Plexiglas, making the screw go through the Plexiglas. That’s why the plexiglass is so thick today, because I wanted the screw to be visible through it, and that’s how it came about.
B. B. & L. M. : What role does craftsmanship play in the manufacture of your pieces today, particularly in light of industrial, economic and production constraints in France?
L. B. : It depends on the products… the collection that is known today… there is not much room for manoeuvre, that’s the constraint. It’s technical and there’s also a question of price, in fact…
Today, I sell a chair for 444€… I would need to increase the price a little more, but at some point we reach psychological thresholds…
It’s not possible to manufacture this collection by hand today. I work with small factories… but they are small businesses that are extremely well equipped, and we don’t really have a choice if we want to keep manufacturing in France.
I’m quite happy that the Plexiglas is partially handcrafted, and the finishes are also done by hand… that contributes to the product and has a big impact on the price…
B. B. & L. M. : Acrylic glass has become a central material in your work. What are its properties and limitations, and why did you choose it over glass or wood?
L. B. : In fact, it’s commonly called Plexiglas, but Plexiglas is a brand name… so it’s a polymer, it’s PMMA… I buy it recycled, it’s recyclable…
People are afraid to sit on glass… and then there’s something else, for example, on tables, I hate the sound of glass on glass…
I’m thinking about the possibility of making a glass chair… but at the time, the question never arose because I didn’t have the network or the technical knowledge to do it…
B. B. & L. M. : Reuse and industrial collaborations seem to be shaping a new phase in your practice today. How do you see your work evolving in the face of environmental challenges and future opportunities?
L. B. : Today, with PMMA… I’m showing that I can’t go any further than what I’m doing… these are products that are designed to last…
We work with partners to reuse their materials… BIC supplies them to us, we compact them, we heat them…
we’re launching this collection before the end of the year…
For my furniture, I want to make a limited edition series… very pop art, where we recycle soldiers, we recycle dolls…
I also work a lot with property developers… recovering X products to transform them into either furniture or works of art… it’s a real focus for me at the moment, I’m actively working on this.