A Retrospective of Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’s Career Opens in Philadelphia

Interior Design: What spurred the exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art?

Erwan Bouroullec: Actually, it was very simple: You get your award, so you have to do an exhibition [laughs]. It had been delayed a few times due to COVID. We wanted to make a kind of show that gives the public a quite broad viewpoint of our work, so we brought in a number of pieces. Some are quite old, some are recent. It’s about showing the diversity of our work. I think that’s something particular to us. We work project by project; we never think about creating a red thread between what we’ve been designing.

ID: The modular Clouds screen for Kvadrat and the weblike Algues for Vitra are standouts in the show. Have you been surprised by the success of these products?

EB: There’s something very particular about Algues: I wouldn’t do this project today because it’s probably one of the worst uses of plastic one could conceive. Plastic becoming fake algae? There’s a lot of controversial meaning inside it today, which at the time wasn’t the same. A big part of our work is designing things that need to be designed, but in which the typology is well identified. But another part of our job has been to dig into conceptual behavior. Algues and Clouds were a part of that.

ID: What do you want visitors to understand about your work?

EB: Something I especially like about our work is that, on the one hand, there’s a certain fantasy, a vision about spaces that you can live in. But I call nearly all our projects “transparent,” since most of the time you can clearly identify the materials they’re made from and how they’ve been assembled. I love the fact that some of them are very dreamy while being incredibly raw and hardcore on the making end.

ID: You’ve created spaces for Kvadrat before. What makes the L.A. one unique?

EB: We had a big white cubic volume; inside it we built a kind of house made with timber sourced from Canada and assembled on-site. Something I like is that the neighborhood it’s in, the Arts District, has these very old brick buildings, with spaces that have been transformed multiple times since they were first built. We were looking to bring a part of the Kvadrat culture to L.A., rather than trying to mimic something that’s considered local. Key to creating a space that’s right for the brand was about showing the textiles well, so that visitors can experience them. To me, that’s an important task. It’s not incredibly fancy if you compare it to a restaurant or something like that. It’s a raw space that connects to the idea that the textiles are inherently an unfinished product.

ID: Has the pandemic altered the way you work?

EB: It’s changed a lot of things, some for the good. Everyone has been thinking a little more about how we consume, what things are made of. It makes me think of our Truss collection for Emeco, which is very raw—there’s that word again—and a sign of where I would like to get to in the end.