Alexander Lervik

Press / 1999

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Alexander was a success in Milan with his stools!

Möbler & miljö 5/99

1 9 5 0 - Scandinavian design becomes an established concept. Mass production has made a breakthrough across all stages. Designers become important to increase production and sales. Furniture pieces such as the Ant, the Swan, the Egg, Coconut are classics that live on to this day. Molded wood is further developed and used extensively. Alexander Lervik was inspired by Arne Jacobsen, Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, among others, and created this chair in molded oak and tubular steel, seat in polyether and fabric. The prototype was manufactured by Ary Gruppen.

Alexander Lervik presents 20th century stools in a new guise

Salone Satellite was a separate exhibition of young design at this year's Milan fair. Among the participants, who came from all corners of the world, was designer Alexander Lervik (26), Stockholm, who presented an interesting and widely noted cavalcade of stools — one for each decade of the 20th century.

In his stand at the exhibition, the ten stools were lined up in front of an effective backdrop with a photograph of beautiful people dressed in party clothes from the different eras. A simple but expressive layout that gave a nice hint of what it was all about.

The fact that Alexander was included in this exhibition is simply because he was invited, which testifies that his talent is already beginning to be known in larger contexts.

In Sweden he has also shown his design in various contexts. Most recently in Carl and Karin Larsson's exhibition "ett hem" where he presents his chair "Ban".

What happens next? — These stools are my graduation project at Beckmans. I made them as a kind of summary of 20th-century design, seen from my perspective, he says.

The stools did not come about by chance. Ahead of the project, Alexander read art and design books, visited museums, watched films with period-typical settings, and cut out pictures to distinguish the different decades.

— When I felt I had found each decade's specific style, I started drawing. In the process, I learned quite a bit about our design history, he says, and is now waiting with excitement to see what will happen on the other side of the turn of the millennium.

Japanese inspiration Alexander Lervik's own view of nineties design thinking is clear in his latest creation — a plastic stool in four identical parts that are joined together into a stable construction. A custom Lego construction, if you will.

— I got the idea during a Japanese seminar at Beckmans when the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban spoke about his life and his philosophy and about the furniture and houses he had designed. Among other things, he had designed houses made of cardboard tubes that could be built in a day. The houses were cheap, resource-efficient, and easy to transport. They were also beautiful to look at.

Simple and resource-efficient

— This matches my image of nineties design - environmentally friendly, simple, and resource-efficient. — Now the challenge is to find a manufacturer willing to invest the roughly half a million it costs to develop a mold to press the stool parts in. Once put into mass production, such a stool does not need to cost more than 150 kronor, he says.

BIRGIT JOHANSSON

Möbler & miljö 5/99

1 9 0 0 - Design after the turn of the century is characterized by the relationship between human and machine. Modern designers leave Art Nouveau behind. Alexander found inspiration for the first decade of the 20th century in the designers Frank Lloyd Wright, Josef Hoffmann, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The material in his stool is black-lacquered wood. Prototype: Swedese.

The 1 9 6 0s are "space," Alexander says. Man has begun to conquer space and walks on the moon. Designers are playful and create forms we never thought we would see. Plastic makes its breakthrough, as do upholstered furniture pieces in organic shapes. Alexander drew inspiration for this stool from Verner Panton, Eero Aarnio, Olivier Mourgue, and Joe Colombo. The frame is in plywood and polyether upholstered in fabric. Lammhults möbler manufactured the prototype.

1990.... a Japanese architect who designed houses made of cardboard tubes, which could be built in a day, gave Alexander inspiration for this stool.

— The philosophy matches my view of nineties design thinking — environ- mentally friendly, simple, and resource-efficient, says Alexander. His stool consists of four identical parts that are joined together into a stable construction. The material is plastic and Alexander made the prototype himself. Now he is looking for an Italian manufacturer who can mass-produce

English translation of the original article. Text read from the scanned original; small transcription errors may occur.