As the Make Good programme approaches its sixth iteration, it’s fascinating to look back at five years of displays, symposia and acquisitions and the wide range of ideas explored. Key to the programme is an interest in bioregional design, as explored in contributions from Material Cultures, Atelier Luma and Cooking Sections, among others. They argue for an approach to design that is sustainable, circular and, above all, anchored in the local environment.
Bioregioning is a relatively new term in the context of contemporary design practice, and not one that is widely used to describe the V&A’s collections. While the museum has an abundance of objects made from local materials, it is less clear when the V&A started to engage with the wider themes of bioregionalism. Do we have objects that show, for example, designers and makers addressing the challenges of producing at scale while remaining committed to sustainability and embedded in their own locale? I decided to take a look.
Just a few metres from Make Good’s dedicated plinth in the Dr Susan Weber Furniture Gallery is a display of chairs made by the Orkney joiner David Kirkness between 1890 and 1900.
Orkney is a small group of islands off Scotland’s northern coast. Around the beginning of the 19th century, local craftspeople and householders began making a very distinctive type of chair. Optimised for the harsh climate, they were high-backed, sometimes with a hood for extra protection from draughts.
With very few trees on the islands, the straw from locally-grown black oats provided an alternative material for roof construction and furniture making. Coils of straw were bound together with a cord made from local bent-grass, then fashioned into stools and chairs. When wooden elements were required, driftwood was gathered from the island’s beaches – a striking example of reuse and circularity.
By the early 1880s, this form of chair-making may well have died out without the intervention of David Kirkness. His innovation was to refine the variety of traditional designs into four standard, marketable models. Built around an efficient workshop operation that employed local craftspeople and outworkers, the business generated orders from local Orcadians, mainland Britain and the wider Commonwealth. As production was scaled up, the driftwood elements had to be replaced by a more reliable source of wood (mainly from Aberdeen) but was otherwise firmly rooted in the islands.
The tradition is kept alive by contemporary Orkney makers such as Kevin Gauld, whose Brodgar chair – a collaboration with Gareth Neal – is also on display.
In 1980, Silio Cardona, a Spanish chemical engineer, was looking for an alternative material for traditional wooden coffins. His family ran a funeral business and he felt it was wrong that so many trees were felled just to be buried underground. At the same time, he became aware that some 300,000 tons of shells were discarded annually by the country’s almond harvesting industry. Much of the processing took place in his local area in Catalonia, where huge mounds of husks blighted the landscape.
Aiming to develop a ‘plastic wood’ he started to mix powdered almond shells with various types of resin. After much experimentation, the result was a mouldable but strong material which he trademarked as Maderón.
Energetically promoted by design journalist Ramón Úbeda, the new material was adopted not by the funeral industry, but by contemporary furniture designers. In the early 1990s, Barcelona-based architect Alberto Lievore was commissioned to design the interior of local bar Rothko, and he used Maderón to make the furniture. When the resulting ‘Rothko chair’ was put into production it was said to reduce costs by 50 percent, relative to an earlier wooden prototype.
Unfortunately, just as the material was gathering momentum – a collaboration with Philippe Starck had been mooted – Cardona died in a road accident. Not only had Maderón lost its creator, Cardona had neglected to share its precise ‘recipe’, and subsequent attempts to replicate it were unsuccessful. A sad end to a very individual pursuit of localism and reuse.
Unfortunately, just as the material was gathering momentum – a collaboration with Philippe Starck had been mooted – Cardona died in a road accident. Not only had Maderón lost its creator, Cardona had neglected to share its precise ‘recipe’, and subsequent attempts to replicate it were unsuccessful. A sad end to a very individual pursuit of localism and reuse.
In 1996, the Rothko chair was exhibited in a V&A temporary display ‘Green Furniture: Ecological Design’ – an examination of environmentally-conscious contemporary furniture production. The display featured another chair with roots in the early 1980s, David Colwell’s C3 model.
At first glance, this chair represents a dramatic break with his earlier highly-acclaimed work in plastic. 1968’s Contour chair, from his graduation collection, was seen at the time as an exemplar of ‘Space age’ modernity, yet it was made using relatively low-tech equipment and with a craft-like respect for the properties of ICI’s newly developed material, Perspex.
As the use of plastic became more contested, Colwell turned to another strong, mouldable material – steam-bent wood. Ash is particularly suited to this technique, especially when freshly harvested, or ‘green’. Launched in 1982, the C3 chair makes use of locally-sourced thinnings – the adolescent trees felled in managed woodlands to promote new growth and biodiversity. Similar principles drive the work of Make Good contributor, Sebastian Cox.
What did I learn from this briefest of surveys? Firstly, that the underlying principles of bioregional design can already be seen across our Furniture and Woodwork Collection. Secondly, that the museum has been acquiring and displaying objects explicitly for their ecological significance for at least 30 years.
Make Good sits within an established tradition of showcasing sustainable, place-based design at the V&A and as the programme continues, we will look to draw together these existing strands as well as championing new work.
