Design, What's Up
February 7, 2012
By David Foster
“Why did you become a designer?” “Because I love building things,” says Konstantin Grcic. Interior Design recently picked the brain of the Chair_One creator with its 10 Questions…. Here are four that we found interesting:
Interior Design: Why did you become a designer?
Because I love building things. When I was 19 years old, I did an apprenticeship for a cabinetmaker and I became intrigued. I discovered that I could create or rethink the things I built. I enrolled at the RCA (Royal Academy of Arts) in London.
What does design mean to you?
That’s an impossible question. You could write a book or say something really stupid.
What do you most like to design?
The physical scale of furniture attracts me. It’s what I’m good at. And it’s what I really like.
Where do you get inspiration?
KG: It comes from everywhere—from daily life.
Visit Interior Design for the rest of Grcic’s answers.
Design
September 14, 2011
By Randall Braaksma
The work of Konstantin Grcic is known for its logical thought process, honesty of materials, and respect for production methods. His partnership with Magis led to one of the most interesting and inventive chairs ever created: Chair_One. “This was a wonderful project to work on,” says Grcic, admitting that his relative youth (and naïveté) led him down unexplored pathways with eyes wide open.
“This was possibly the first time ever that such a large die-cast was used for making a chair,” he explains. “It involved a lot of heavy tooling. I decided to break up surfaces into thin sections like branches and let the material flow through the mold to create the shape, which is kind of like a basket or a grid, and very three-dimensional.”
Chair_One now resides in the permanent collections of many prestigious museums including MoMA in New York and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. It joins other Grcic pieces in museum permanent collection, including his Mayday Lamp, produced for Flos in 1999.