Studio Swine Unpacks An Epic Anthology Of American Hardwood Furniture Design
Curated and designed by Studio Swine, ‘Forest Tales’ brings together 22 specially selected designs from the American Hardwood Export Council’s (AHEC) recent projects in a truly spectacular showcase of both global design talent and the beauty and versatility of American Hardwood as a design material. The project was exhibited at Triennale Milano, during the Milan Design Week.
“Forest Tales brings together a celebration of exceptional design from AHEC’s latest projects, a love for timber and a much-needed call for balance. Balance in the way we use natural materials with particular emphasis on renewable ones, such as wood. Covid has shown that the world can react very quickly to a major global crisis, hopefully this experience will enable us to quickly make the necessary changes in the way we consume, build and live,” said David Venables, Director, AHEC Europe.
Showing at Triennale Milano in June, Forest Tales is the culmination of AHEC’s creative work over the past two years. Studio Swine has curated pieces from four projects, which despite the diversity of their output, are united through material – each piece is made from one (or more) of three underused American Hardwood varieties: Maple, Cherry and Red Oak.
THE PROJECTS
Connected: which challenged nine world-renowned international designers to create tables and seating responding to the isolation imposed by the pandemic; Discovered: Designers for Tomorrow: which gave a platform to 20 emerging design talents from around the world; Slow Design for Fast Change: which brought together nine young designers from the DACH countries to create furniture and objects characterized by sustainability, longevity and craftsmanship; A Seat at the Table: a new collaboration with Italian furniture maker Riva 1920 that sees four emerging Italian designers selected to create innovative, sustainable designs for solid-wood tables. For Forest Tales, Studio Swine takes a selection of pieces from each project and incorporates them into a labyrinthine “mountain” of wooden crates – a monumental and immersive exhibition design that invites visitors to enter, explore, and discover a fresh perspective on furniture. “We were delighted to be invited by AHEC to propose a display. It’s a great honor for us to be invited to design an exhibition… in a venue with the history of Triennale, during Salone. It was crucial to do something bold and impactful which can do justice to the extraordinary works by all the established and emerging designers, whilst at the same time creating no waste,” said a spokesman for Studio Swine.
Featuring 22 designers from 14 countries, the exhibition line-up is a veritable who’s who of contemporary design. Featured designs include work by both established and emerging designers, ranging from Heatherwick Studio’s biophilic Stem table in Maple and Studio Swine’s own steam-bent Red Oak tribute to Ming Dynasty design, to Taiho Shin’s inventive, expanding, glue-less shelving systems, Maria Bruun’s quintessentially Nordic stackable stools, and Simon Gehring’s three-wood chair that fuses computational design processes and leftover timber scraps to unique effect.
BOXING CLEVER
Studio Swine’s concept for the installation is inspired by the opening frames of Citizen Kane, in which Kane’s belongings are shown amid a vast jumble of wooden crates, to be assessed and packed away. Visitors stepping into the gallery will be confronted with an interesting topography of wooden packing crates – the same ones used to transport the furniture – with the various pieces displayed at different levels atop, under, and beside them. Screens, showing video content about the pieces, the initiatives behind them and the woods from which they were made, will be woven into the ‘cratescape’. The surfaces of the crates themselves serve as blank canvases for images depicting the forest landscape from which the Hardwoods originate.
Following the idea of anamorphic perspective, whereby an image only becomes clear when seen from a specific viewpoint (famously exemplified by the skull in Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors), each crate will be painted to depict a single element of a larger scene, so that, when viewed from a certain angle, the images on the crates come together to form a complete picture. The viewer’s perspective of the exhibition will therefore shift depending on where they are standing – from one angle, they will see the complete image of a forest; at another, the image fragments and the furniture becomes the focus. Different stories are told as you interact with the space.
HIGH PROFILE, LOW IMPACT
The notion of shifting perspectives is integral to both form and content of the installation. Forest Tales is not only a showcase of creativity, but an argument against waste in design, a plea for a more thoughtful choice of materials, and a challenge to the status quo. Conscious that many Milan exhibitions generate substantial amounts of waste, AHEC and Studio Swine were determined that Forest Tales should be as material-efficient and close to carbon-zero as possible, while also ensuring that its sustainability message reaches as many of the key industry decision makers in Milan as possible. That meant it had to be epic in scale.
The use of crates allows Studio Swine and AHEC to achieve maximum attention with minimal impact. The crates are multipurpose, used to display, ship, and store the exhibits, so there is no set to dispose of when the festival is over – it simply returns to its original purpose.
THE CASE FOR TIMBER
With Forest Tales, AHEC aims to provide a global platform to designers, pieces and projects that have not yet been widely seen due to the pandemic, but also to demonstrate the extraordinary potential of a selection of underused American Hardwoods as sustainable design materials. This is especially important at a time when stocks of more widely used European Hardwoods have been depleted by overuse, and supply lines heavily disrupted by the current geopolitical situation. Maple, Cherry and Red Oak are all versatile woods that grow at a faster rate than they are harvested. Strong, practical, tactile, beautiful and rapidly renewable, they are nevertheless significantly underutilized by the furniture industry – in some cases because they have fallen out of favor as trends change, in others because they are simply not well understood. With this exhibition, AHEC seeks to turn the industry’s heads towards a selection of three American Hardwoods as the perfect combination of aesthetics, durability and practicality – ideal materials for our current and coming generations of designers and innovators to create beautiful, long-lasting furniture that is either carbon-neutral or carbon-negative.
“Forest Tales reflects on how the use of a wider range of sustainable materials, such as the three U.S. Hardwoods featured in the exhibition, and all wood species in general, proportionate to what grows in the forest, makes the use of the resource and the way we consume more thoughtful and responsible,” concluded David Venables. “And for the first time, the entire industry ecosystem, including designers, specifiers and consumers, seems aligned in wanting to do the right thing in the face of the environmental imperative.”
