IDEAT

IDEAT-Alexander Lervik

IDEAT · Portraits & interviews · 2 pages

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/ No. 47 October 2006 - 11€

escape-art-trends

T01469-47-F: 4,00 €-RD

Ideas

The 50s saw the emergence of "design" on the ashes of "decoration". On the occasion of this special fifties issue, we went to ask four current designers from two different generations how the creation of those crazy years had influenced them.

Alexander Lervik

He is 34 years old and lives in Lidingo, Sweden. Because when he was a student, this representative of the young guard of Swedish design set up an original project, Tools, based on different kinds of seating, decade by decade.

www.alexanderlervik.com Dolphin Chair in molded wood (Johanson Design).

Which designers seem to you the most emblematic of the 50s? The Dane Arne Jacobsen and the American couple Charles and Ray Eames. Spontaneously, their names are the ones that come to mind because they each developed entire areas of industrial design with a new way of using materials.

[ BY GUY-CLAUDE AGBOTON

Coffee-table Neptun in wenge (Johanson Design).

/ Studio Chair in molded wood, prototype.

And then those two each have a strong personality that you feel through what they design. You sense special, unique men.

Something from the fifties that you see today with pleasure?

Eero Saarinen's Tulip chair! Because of the beauty of its lines, I literally a-dore it.

In your opinion, what did the word design correspond to in Scandinavia in the fifties? I wasn't born at the time so I wasn't there, but for me, the word design in the 50s makes me think of something inspired by the forms of nature. I don't know exactly who the word design really clicked with, but well, in my opinion, it surely must have been an elite...

What idea or lesson can be drawn from this decade today? Ah! That anything is possible!

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