The Mootu lounger at Dutch Design Week
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How mridangam makers and Chennai’s Justine De Penning and Deepak Jawahar, of design agency The Architecture Story, collaborated for the continuing Dutch Design Week
Eindhoven within the Netherlands is seeing a surge in guests, albeit just about. The nineteenth Dutch Design Week has kicked off and persons are logging on to take a look at over 500 reveals in 3D viewing rooms. Think mild installations with discarded lenses, residing coffins (with mycelium) and textiles woven by drones.
But it’s an exhibit at the Dutch Invertuals Gallery’s True Matter present that we’re concerned about. Equal components eye-catching and complicated, the Mootu Lounger by Chennai-based design agency, The Architecture Story, is formed like a ‘U’ and strung with moulded leather-based items. Is it furnishings or artwork? Can one sit on it? Turns out, designers and companions Justine De Penning and Deepak Jawahar welcome such questions. “We wanted to take design as an opportunity for divergent thinking,” says Jawahar, 35. “The point was to think of different ways that a body can interact with an object, and the lounger plays with perception and interaction.”
And, although it’s possible you’ll not see it instantly, the conceptual design has its origin story within the mridangam, the principle percussion instrument in a Carnatic music ensemble.
Justine De Penning and Deepak Jawahar of The Architecture Story
The intersection
- The Architecture Story’s ethos is one among immersive storytelling. “What we highlight with all our projects is a sense of experimentation and playfulness,” says De Penning, including that they’re engaged on a home in Tiruvannamalai, the place your complete facade is finished like a staircase. “It is almost like you are extending a traditional outdoor space like a thinnai all the way up the building. What that does is create a completely different social dynamic.” Their distinct backgrounds of structure — Jawahar earlier labored at famend architectural agency, UNStudio, and has exhibited at the Milan Design Week and India Design ID — and theatre add to this inventive method. “Both examine spatial relationships. In theatre, you look at how to break the fourth wall and make the audience a part of the play. That is what architecture does too. This is where the practices intersect,” says Jawahar.
Giving sound kind
A number of months in the past, Invertuals had challenged 22 younger designers from 17 international locations to work with uncooked supplies from their native context, and to play with strategies, craftsmanship and traditions. “We thought it would be interesting to explore music and design — not in a direct way, but through the tectonics [method of bringing things together] of music creation,” says De Penning, 33, whereas her husband Jawahar provides, “During our research, we found that [Indian physicist and Nobel Prize winner] CV Raman’s light scattering experiments were inspired by Indian percussion instruments. So we wondered, could it lend itself to design as well?”
While debating find out how to break free from common modes of understanding kind, the duo determined to look at the mridangam. Something that was consultant of ‘place’, of Tamil Nadu. “We visited mridangam makers in Mylapore [an area synonymous with Carnatic music] and different parts of Chennai, and learned that the mootu [the moulded leather that covers the two mouths of the instrument] is used for three to four years and then discarded. So it is a generational craft that doesn’t have an afterlife,” explains Jawahar. They took house various mootus to experiment with — deconstructing it, immersing it in water, shaping it with one other object. “For the final piece, we used the techniques and tectonics of the mridangam to create the story we wanted,” he says.
Making of the Mootu Lounger
Walking parallel worlds
This meant working with mridangam makers, hand-cutting 14×4 round leather-based items, puncturing 48 holes across the circumference (the dimensions of the circles and the quantity and place of the holes are derived from the mridangam mootu) and knotting them with leather-based ropes.
Public calls for
- “We are both drawn to the idea of public space. We feel it is interesting and complex, and something that design can intervene on,” says De Penning, founding father of co-working area The Grid in Adyar (with its mid-century and industrial design types). Their earlier tasks embrace the Chennai Photo Biennale and Magnetic Fields Festival. “Now, in the post-pandemic world, we are really fascinated with how both the work and domestic spaces will evolve. Offices will be seen less as production spaces and more as social accelerators — with a cross-breed of environments [such as cafes, etc],” provides Jawahar. And because the identification of places of work dilutes, the emphasis on domesticity, he feels, will change radically. “In this new environment where you live and work, how do you rebalance? How to stop working will be the next thing. These are interesting changes coming our way.”
“When designing the framework, we did look at bringing in sound. The shape of the ‘U’, if filled with sound, allows for a certain movement,” De Penning tells me. But the will to create a minimal translation had them deciding to not confuse the architectural framework with a sonic ingredient.
The third piece of furnishings from the three-year-old agency — the sooner two embrace a desk constructed from marble, granite and steel, and a steel origami chair — the piece won’t be mass produced, however they’re open to commissions. As for the artisans, early suspicions about whether or not the duo was engaged on a brand new musical instrument have since became enthusiasm for extra such experiments. “It was exhilarating,” Jawahar says. “Through August and September, in the mornings we would have these intellectual discussions on design with the gallerists and designers and [later in the day] go to Mylapore to collect the mootu and talk with the artisans. As designers, we were at the intersection of these two worlds. It pushed us to re-look TEK [traditional ecological knowledge] and the parallel worlds we are living in.”
The Dutch Design Week is on until October 25. Details: ddw.nl, tas.design
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