Alexander Lervik – the designer who starts with the question

He has made a lamp from his own brain, another from chocolate, transformed a lift into a piece of furniture, and persuaded some of the world’s leading photographers to interpret his chairs. But for Alexander Lervik, design has never primarily been about creating beautiful objects. After nearly three decades as a designer, the driving force remains the same: finding the idea that makes us see an everyday object in a new way.

There is a fairly effective way to understand Alexander Lervik’s career. You can, of course, list the furniture, the lamps, the exhibitions, the museums and the awards. But you can also begin with a stool.

The year is 1998, and Lervik is about to graduate from the Design Programme at Beckmans in Stockholm. Around him are hundreds of other graduating students who also want to be discovered. So the question he asks himself is not simply what he should design.

It is: How do I make myself stand out among all the graduating students from Sweden’s design schools?

The answer becomes his graduation project, 10 Stools 10 Decades, in which he interprets the design history of the 20th century through ten stools.

The exhibition began to take on a life of its own. It toured internationally for several years and was seen by more than a million people. But for the young designer, perhaps the strongest recognition came in a considerably smaller format: a letter from Rolf Fehlbaum, then owner of Vitra, congratulating him on his graduation project.

It is an almost improbably perfect opening scene to a career. But above all, the project established a way of working that can still be recognised in Lervik almost three decades later.

He rarely starts with the form.

In 2001, Lervik presented Bright Handle in Milan. The idea emerged from the meeting of two familiar systems: the traffic light and the “do not disturb” sign on a hotel-room door.

The result was a door handle that, using red and green LED light, could communicate whether a room was occupied or available.

Today, when almost every product around us communicates digitally, the idea may seem obvious. At the time, it was something entirely different.

Bright Handle gained international attention and was published in media in more than 100 countries around the world.

It also marked the beginning of something that would recur throughout Lervik’s career: light as a material.

In 2007, this exploration culminated in the exhibition Enlightenment at the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg. There, he presented 18 objects built around LED technology, at a time when the technology had only just begun to become practically usable as a light source in design. The exhibition also helped establish him as a light artist.

A television feature about the exhibition later led to an unexpected phone call from Skandia. The commission became a monumental light artwork for the company’s headquarters: a three-by-three-by-three-metre cube in which 1,740 heads represented the employees and were illuminated with LED.

The idea was based on technology Lervik had previously used in a dance floor for a nightclub.

It says something about his method. Knowledge from one project is rarely archived and forgotten. It reappears somewhere completely different.

A dance floor can become an artwork at an insurance company.

There is another characteristic that keeps reappearing when you follow Lervik’s career: an almost systematic unwillingness to accept boundaries between disciplines.

When, fifteen years after his graduation project, he wanted to create a follow-up, he decided not to design anything himself.

Instead, others would interpret his work.

The project became 15 Chairs 15 Photographers. Lervik first contacted some of Sweden’s leading photographers. When they said yes, he continued internationally.

The instruction was simple: choose one of my chairs and do whatever you want with it.

The resulting project included photographers such as Mary Ellen Mark, Martin Parr, Lynn Goldsmith, Vee Speers, Dawid, Gunnar Smoliansky and Annika von Hausswolff.

It sounds banal. But in a creative career, it is almost a philosophy.

The same attitude led to collaborations far beyond the traditional furniture world. With the fashion label Fifth Avenue Shoe Repair, he developed 3D-printed jewellery for the catwalk. When he later had the idea of working with music and glass, he simply wrote to Eva Dahlgren.

She replied.

The collaboration grew into an art project in which Dahlgren specially composed a piece of music that they jointly translated into five glass installations, produced together with Målerås Glassworks.

Once again, it is the same method.

An idea. A question. A phone call or a letter.

And then you see what happens.

Despite all the detours, Lervik continually returns to furniture – and perhaps above all to the chair.

Over the years, he has worked with a number of Scandinavian and international manufacturers, including Johanson Design, Skandiform, Adea and the Italian company Moroso.

With Johanson Design, the relationship became far greater than individual products. During his years as creative director, Lervik played a part in an extensive transformation of the company’s identity and product range.

At the same time, he began to see how traditional manufacturing knowledge risked disappearing as generations of craftspeople left the industry.

From that insight, his own brand Tingest was born in 2013.

For the first time, he could control the entire chain himself – from the initial idea to production, communication and sales.

In 2018, Tingest was sold to Design House Stockholm.

The decision was also a realisation of what he actually wanted to be.

Entrepreneurship was appealing, but design was more appealing.

The design industry has changed radically since that graduation exhibition in 1998. Digitalisation has transformed the tools, 3D printing has gone from experimentation to everyday practice, and technologies that once required specialists can now be found on the desktop.

But technology itself never seems to have been Lervik’s true fascination.

He uses it when it makes an idea possible.

That is an important distinction.

MYBrain is not interesting because it is 3D-printed. It is interesting because 3D printing made it possible to hold an exact physical copy of a human brain in your hand.

Bright Handle was not about LED. It was about a door handle suddenly being able to communicate.

The Aritco project is not only about lifts. It is about what happens when you move an object from one mental category to another: from machine to furniture.

And the chocolate lamp is definitely not only about chocolate.

It is about what a lamp actually is.

Perhaps this is where the real consistency in Alexander Lervik’s work can be found.

He has spent a large part of his career questioning nouns.

Chair. Lamp. Door handle. Lift.

We think we know what they mean because we have seen them thousands of times before.

Lervik seems to regard that as the problem.

And perhaps that is the best summary of his career.

In 1998, a 26-year-old student stood in front of his graduation exhibition trying to work out how to make people stop in front of his particular project among hundreds of others.

Almost three decades later, Alexander Lervik is still working with the same question.