Piet Hein Eek

These boxes are made of a single piece of wood. By sawing off a slice around the wood each time and then shaping the slices and gluing them back together, you can make quite a few boxes with the only material loss being the saw-cuts. Creating something without material loss or, alternatively, from waste is one of my strongest drives. This originates from a profound love and respect for materials in general. In a sense, this is not really a unique trait, considering the fact that the material is the most important element of any design. It was a pleasant surprise when nature returned the favour to us, so to speak: the boxes are made in such a way that it is as if you are looking inside the tree trunk and can see how it grew, including a branch that runs all the way into the heart of the tree.

After Jeanine and I created the first tile cabinets back in 1993, we created another series, of pillar cabinets. In the years that followed, our joint production efforts were limited to our three daughters, who, one by one, made it impossible for Jeanine to work professionally in any capacity. Right when the clay was made and the mixer was in the barrel, we’d get a call that one of the children had a bad cough or, for some other reason, needed to be picked up from day care or school. As the children grew older, it slowly but surely became easier to resume working together. Whether or not by coincidence, we suddenly started receiving more orders for our ceramic cabinets: pillar cabinets in all the colours of the rainbow, and cabinets with birch, aluminium and porcelain, as well as an order from Roberto Polo to design a dual set of tile cabinets in black and white, wood and steel. We decided to make both cabinets in a series of three. What I like to call my ‘puzzle period’ culminated in a grand finale with the cabinets (the puzzle period was the period in which I was working on the stairwell solution for the Westergasfabriek and on the interior of the National Glass Museum). In previous years, due to the desire and necessity to develop affordable products and objects, I had become more and more adept at putting together three-dimensional structures in a simple manner. Little by little, the structures became more complex and increasingly detailed, hence the ‘puzzle’ reference. A kind of infrastructure was created on the inside of the cabinets, so that the drawers and fronts could be placed as desired. This infrastructure was almost impossible to devise, so we ultimately decided to make the details one by one and then assemble them afterwards. These are cabinets in which not only Jeanine’s decorative side converges with my austere and pragmatic side, but also in which simplicity of detail due to quantity leads to complexity, only to once again result in a stark bearer of decorative ceramic elements.

The story behind the faceted vases goes back quite far. They ultimately resulted from the flat clay dishes I came up with after seeing my children rolling clay with a pasta roller in my wife’s studio. Making ceramics is one of the oldest industrial processes on the planet, by which plaster moulds are used to cast continuously identical products. I found it absolutely fascinating to try to construct with clay as I would with sheet metal. I immediately put together a cup with handle to see if it was possible. It turned out to be just that and this was followed by an entire collection of flat clay products. But when we tried to make pitchers, the clay turned out to be too weak and the whole thing collapsed. It was possible, however, to do this using metal moulds as a sort of scaffolding. The moulds we created turned out to be products in themselves.

These three paintings of steel and stainless steel are the latest three pieces created as part of the scrap project. The scrap project was launched in 2000 and was born out of the desire to escape the everyday necessity to work as efficiently as possible. In the race to work as little as possible for as much money as possible, less and less attention is paid to materials and residual materials are often written off as waste. It is cheaper to saw off large numbers of small pieces from one large board than to save small pieces of wood, remember where you put them and then select the usable pieces to make a leg out of. I figured I’d turn the whole thing around instead. Materials are invaluable and work is free. This way, you get to spend as much time as you want. The piece is the result of an endless repetition of actions. Whereas, normally, as little attention as possible would be paid to these materials, the value of these pieces is based 100% on the patience of a saint.

Design of pipe table, chair with armrests, chair and stools

Materials:

Tubes: dismantled from our building Fabric: old awning from the buildings demolished around us. Tabletop: recycled beams

The tube chair is made of old pipes that were salvaged from the building we bought and renovated last year. In spite of the huge number of pipes we discarded, we also managed to save quite a large quantity. The first pipe piece we produced was the pipe bar for the restaurant. This was followed by the design for this armchair, bar chairs, small bar tables and, finally (for now at least), the pipe bench (although we have plenty of other ideas for other objects). The models are numbered consecutively by name (i.e. chair no. 1, bench no. 2, and so on).

The chunky beam bench is part of a series of objects made from enormous old beams. Since there is only a limited stock of these beams, the series is limited. A chunky beam armchair, as well as a number of other objects, is also being produced. The idea is inspired by a large number of beams we purchased a few years back and which we had been at a loss at what to do with ever since. So this back-to-basics design, in all its simplicity, is the result of a rather longprocess of designing, experimenting and producing. The models are numbered consecutively by name (i.e. armchair no. 1, bench no. 2, and so on).