Better Sensation
Erwan Bouroullec, photographed at La Grange (image: Fabian Böhm).
In recent years, Erwan Bouroullec’s practice has diversified dramatically. Previously known for his work in furniture and lighting design with his brother Ronan, Bouroullec has become increasingly interested in consumer electronics, coding and forms of creative practice that sit outside of the traditional design industry. While the Bouroullecs’ design studio still operates from its Paris office, the brothers have both found spaces outside the French capital for more independent research work: Ronan in their native Brittany, Erwan in Burgundy. It is to the latter – to Erwan’s converted barn, La Grange – that I’m heading on a hot July day to talk to him about this new phase of personal and professional life.
The day that I make my pilgrimage to La Grange – first catching the Eurostar from London and then taking a TGV train the 90-minute journey from Paris – is recorded as being the hottest on record in both France and the UK. The build-up to the heatwave’s peak has been intense and, as temperatures nudge past 40°C, frenzied newsreels in the UK report trains being cancelled due to tracks overheating and hospitals full of people suffering from heat stroke. In France, only a few hundred kilometres southwest of my destination, wildfires burn, displacing a quarter of a million people from their homes and prompting headlines of “a heat apocalypse”. As I step off the train, the rolling, and still fairly verdant, hills of Burgundy do nothing to ease the feeling of not being able to breathe. There is no wind, no glimmer of water to ease the sense of suffocating air.
With the climate emergency unfolding as a reminder of industrialised society’s sins visited upon the Earth, it is time for everybody to consider their impact on our quickly unravelling reality. It is within this context that I meet Bouroullec, aiming to get a sense of how his thinking has been impacted by Covid-19 and its lockdowns; his thoughts on the increasing conversations around how design converges with issues connected to climate change and sustainability; and the effect that a new space to work and live in has had on his practice. Bouroullec’s interests lie in disparate fields, but all are somewhat united in his personal project: La Grange.
An EB-LG-F71 HIMD stool, produced using materials and labour sourced from within 5km of La Grange (image courtesy of Erwan Bouroullec).
La Grange is a plot of land and farm buildings that Bouroullec has redeveloped in Burgundy as a second home and studio. While the space holds a private interest, it has also come to influence his public work: his coding explores the surrounding countryside, for instance, capturing the land within coded artworks; he has created furniture that uses scavenged materials as essential elements, all sourced from within a 5km radius and made locally; and he has partnered with the architect Charlotte Vuarnesson and local builders to restore the property with a lightness of touch that retains many of its historical features. This is a project that doesn’t do more than it has to in order to create a habitable space. It reuses materials found on site and in the surrounding landscape where possible.
While the idea of retreating to a place in the country is a luxury afforded to only a few – proof of the success the Bouroullecs’ studio has enjoyed in the last 20 years – it is a move that Erwan does not consider to represent his turning away from the industry he works for, or the people he works with. Instead, he is busy thinking of its potential and benefits – not only to himself and his family, but to students and colleagues. His retreat from the city is not a private one, as the invite to visit reveals, but rather a statement of intent. A statement that, like La Grange, remains a work in progress and may never reach a conclusion, but which hopes to catalyse important conversations along the way.
One of the farm buildings at La Grange (image: Charles Pétillon).
Johanna Agerman Ross How did you find this place?
Erwan Bouroullec It was an attempt to find a second place to work and live in that could provide a balance to Paris. I was always looking for quite a wide, open space, but it was strange because most of the places [that met that description] were almost like chateaux – they were moving into being something far more bourgeois. What I liked about this place was that it was an old farm and I could really feel that in all of its details – it was a working farm and you can see that in how it had been set up for utility, with this kind of low-key practice in the way it had been built and adapted. But, really, the landscape was everything. It felt like this place could be a parallel to Paris, even if I didn’t actually know Burgundy at all – the rural landscape was what attracted me. Ronan is fascinated by the sea, but I belong much more to the countryside, and to its greens. Looking for this place was a very clear search for, not a better way of life, but at least a very strong “sensation”. Nature here has a very clear character and I’m sure that, for a design practice, it’s good to be able to look at the world through a different perspective.
Johanna You mentioned that Burgundy was new to you. Is its landscape one that you recognise? Brittany, where you grew up, is quite different.
Erwan Brittany is relatively far away, both in distance and time, and most of my memories from that area are linked to my family rather than its landscape. The Brittany that built most of my memories was a hardcore agricultural area, with heavy breeding of pigs and chickens, so it was a little bit of a sad landscape – many of the borders between the fields had disappeared, and there were fewer and fewer trees. I can see some parallels between Burgundy and Brittany, however. In France, if you go lower than the Loire you come into the south of the country, whereas I belong much more to the north, which is still very green and far less rocky. But I didn’t want to go back to where I had come from.
Construction work underway at the farm, which is being overseen by Bouroullec and architect Charlotte Vuarnesson (image: Charlotte Vuarnesson).
Johanna It’s about establishing something on your own terms.
Erwan Yes.
Johanna Along with the farm, you acquired some land and forest – what’s the significance of that? Was that always a part of the plan?
Erwan The area had been a little bit abandoned, so it was quite easy and made sense [to acquire that land]. Since we’ve been here, we’ve been replanting some things in the surrounding fields, but we’re really trying to let the wild come in. I’m very far from planning any kind of formal garden – I’m quite happy to let things come in naturally and explore what is already here. There’s a pond, for example, and this place must have originally been built because there was water in the area. But that pond was just full of things when we arrived: bushes, trees, everything. So we needed to clean everything out and dig down into the clay. Two years later, it’s incredible. The water has come back, millions of frogs have returned, and so have many plants. In general, we’re working with “non-intervention”: we’re happy to just discover all of this. One of the problems in our world, which industrial design has played a part in, is that certain molecules have become so dominant. Polypropylene is a wonderful plastic, it has amazing properties, but it’s so widely used. Palm oil, similarly, is a good fit for the industrial process and so has become overly dominant. What has been nice here is that we have seen how nature has an amazing ability to overlay many things and allow things to cohabit. It’s nice to be confronted with that.
Johanna And that natural overlay is influencing you?
Erwan I’m very far from being a “new peasant”. I’m not moving into permaculture and I’m just trying to let things happen. It’s funny, because I think my design practice is quite minimal in a certain way and taking care of this land will also be minimal. Try to do nothing and just let things happen. So many people can’t bear that, and ask why I’m letting everything grow, but my idea is that year after year, the land will become better and better and better. We need to let nature grow again.
A work from The Impossible series of coded artworks, photographed in the landscape that inspired it.
Johanna But even if it’s not a landscaped garden or a super-intentional construction, you have nevertheless replanted all that grass, you have cut things back. There’s still an intervention.
Erwan Yes, but I’m trying to not control too much. It’s ridiculous to imagine perfect lawns, because you need to make so much effort to contradict what’s a basic logic of nature – the greater the mixture of species, the more control each plant has. Just letting things happen is a strong decision. But a counterpart to all that is that I love the intervention of humans within a landscape. I have a very strong attraction to rural machinery and buildings, because they provide a very strange opposite to the landscape. The equipment uses plain, synthetic colours: strong reds and greens, or even fluoros. Then the buildings themselves are amazing because they’re so incredibly geometrical and react very strongly to the light. To me, nature is this interweaving of plants, animals and human production, [the latter of] which becomes a new part of nature. I know it’s a kind of contradictory expression, but what I’m looking for is this mixture of human presence and nature. That’s part of my romanticism around landscape.
La Grange in the Burgundy landscape (image: Charles Pétillon).
Johanna What you’re hinting at is that nature isn’t necessarily “natural”. So much of what we see around us, even landscape, is human-made somewhere down the line. There’s a cultural history that you can see very clearly in this landscape. But what strikes me is that, just as you’ve adapted or adopted the landscape around you, you’ve also approached the buildings in that same way – they’re not trying to do too much architecturally.
Erwan I’ve been doing this with Charlotte Vuarnesson from Le Dévéhat Vuarnesson Architectes, who is a friend of mine, and I’m really trying to bring much more “performance” into my design practice. I’m once again dreaming the real dream of design, which is to provide better with fewer resources and less use of material. I’m not sure I really understood the scale of this project when we started – everything was down to us. We had to redo all the carpentry, the roof, everything. So this has been a real process of listening and understanding, which is something that I know how to do from design. When I work with prototypers, I have really learned that the best that you can do is make sure that they understand how everything they do is valuable – that’s what creates this amazing detailing in projects. I’m convinced that design is a question of building a culture that can bind people together. It’s a complex thing to express, but sometimes you can find an approach in which you’re making things emerge from people, rather than making things by yourself. That’s what I’ve been doing here with the buildings. I’ve been looking for a certain roughness, looking back a little to the way things were done in the past. It’s more about establishing a way of practising, rather than very precisely defining things. For me, a big part of this was done through intuition, and the only way to achieve that was to work with Charlotte, because the builders absolutely still needed drawings, numbers, studies and so on. I was asking for so much intuition from them, but the only way to let them express that was to be clear about the performance we were looking for.
One of the windows at La Grange (image: Philippe Thibault).
Johanna Was embarking on this project with the farmhouse a way of approaching architecture or is it just a way of getting somewhere to live?
Erwan Nearly everything I do in life is somehow connected to my work, but I wouldn’t say it’s a statement of architecture for me, which I guess could be very different for Charlotte. I do find the overall practice fascinating, however. I’ve been telling my daughters that, here, you can do whatever you want. There are so many materials available to you in the countryside. You can go and collect branches from the forest, for example, and work with those, and we’ve also been trying to make a rough oven so that we can cook some of the clay we’ve dug up from the ground.
Johanna For you it’s an opportunity to experiment?
Erwan I’m more and more understanding that there can be an unbeatable value in making by yourself – to explore a form of making that is imprecise and which doesn’t need any pre-required skills, but which can still create incredible value. This is one of the largest questions of product design in general. A century ago, your clothes would likely be made by a clothes maker; your furniture would be made by a cabinet maker. Many of the things in a person’s life would be made by them or else by a local maker. There would always be more of an interaction and I’m really happy to be exploring that kind of making again today. You don’t need to be polite with the materials – you can be very rough and work quickly with your hands without needing too much organisation.
Part of The Wanderer ITW (Into the Wild) series (image courtesy of Erwan Bouroullec).
Johanna You’re talking about industrial design and how we’ve moved away from individual makers, but are you saying that you think there is a way back to that?
Erwan No, it’s more that I’m totally into design – just exploring everything together. Design is really about building a culture or making a culture visible. It’s an issue of binding people together around a certain culture. You need to look for those signs – in furniture design, for example, you need to identify what sign makes something look comfortable. If something looks comfortable, it will be comfortable. If it doesn’t look comfortable, it won’t be. To identify these signs, you need to practise – it’s not like you can just find them straight away.
Johanna This kind of return to nature, or a return to a more rough and rustic point of view, is something that we can see happened historically as well, with modernists such as Le Corbusier creating his Cabanon or the Lubetkins experimenting with furniture made from small diameter wood and cow hide. What do you think the need is for someone like you, who has a history of making and manufacturing very precisely, to revisit nature? What is psychologically interesting to you about it?
Erwan I’m at a point at which I believe less in the extreme power of an idea. I’m starting to believe more in better sensation, better practice. But if you start to look for that, you need to be in situ. When you’re in a very strong environment, there is something very interesting, insofar as all the parameters you have in your practice are reinforced. If you are doing something with a foraged piece of wood, for example, which is not a perfect piece of timber, it forces you to access a very primal form of making because the parameters are more extreme. This helps you access a kind of radicalness because the environment itself is bringing you to something more radical. In a more urban environment, so many possibilities are open that the parameters are looser – there is nothing fundamental. I guess that nature, farmland or whatever it may be, creates limits within which you act. You can’t escape sensation here. You can’t escape the rain or the sun. In an urban environment, there are many things you can escape.
Image: Charles Pétillon.
Johanna One of the things you’ve worked on here in Burgundy are a selection of furniture pieces, whose legs are made from very rough foraged branches, with Douglas fir tops. How does that project factor into what you’ve been discussing?
Erwan I wouldn’t even call it a project. I was here during the lockdown and, because we own this tiny piece of forest, it became interesting to think about forestry. We saw that the foresters only collect the trunks from the trees they fell and then just leave all the branches on the ground, so I was thinking, “OK, why don’t we do some easygoing, open production? Collect these sticks and assemble them with some Douglas fir that comes from a couple of kilometres away.” It’s been an interesting “back to the future” method, because collecting the branches nowadays seems quite nonprofessional, but you do have to think about what kind of branches you need. So it’s a kind of practice as a state of mind, instead of, you know, purely designing an object. I would love to find a network to produce and deliver these objects every year, but I wouldn’t want to do a limited edition. I like the idea of producing and releasing them according to the season and then just waiting for the next season. People are always saying that Ronan and I are inspired by nature because they see certain natural forms and patterns within our work, but from my point of view we’re far more interested in the way nature operates. So I’m very far from trying to make this as a statement piece, like Enzo Mari did with [his DIY furniture manual] Autoprogettazione: it’s more about the making.
Image: Charles Pétillon.
Johanna So, within that, is there a criticism or questioning of the industry you’re working for?
Erwan It’s a little bit different – at the end of the day, you accept the task of industry or you don’t. It’s quite simple. I don’t criticise industry, but I am looking for information that is valuable to share. Industry is formed from standards and high levels of repetition, with everything based upon reducing the amount of variation possible within a process. So you need materials where you’re able to replicate the same thing 100 per cent of the time to the same quality. But I think we need to find a way to accept that things can’t be 100 per cent perfect all of the time, because that’s generating many issues around ecology. Permanently pushing to master everything, to repeat everything, is pushing us towards a very strong form of capitalism. Around here, however, I’ve seen a lot of farmers working with new forms of organic farming, which is one of the only examples I know of something progressing by moving backwards. Progress normally amounts to more and more industrialisation, which can be interesting because it lets you use fewer and fewer resources to build something. A lightbulb, for example, is now almost like a leaf from a tree – it costs nothing – and you only achieve that kind of result through heavy industrialisation. But industrialisation also means more engineering and more investment in manufacturing resources. If you look at the history of cars, for example, they’re much more efficient and far cheaper compared to what they were like in the past, but they also require a huge industrial system in order to be produced like that. Most of the time, progress means this kind of ever-growing complexity, but some forms of agriculture present a different point of view. The quantity of produce will change every year, and the product isn’t always the same – depending on the time of year, the taste of a goat’s cheese changes a lot, for example. What I’m trying to do here is to also explore a slightly different method. I’m making quickly and roughly – doing exactly what is needed, but without over-finishing. What I’m doing doesn’t need a large production. I don’t see that as a statement against industrial production; it’s just a different point of view.
Image: Charles Pétillon.
Johanna You presented these furniture pieces at 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen with The Wrong Shop – how come you wanted to enter them into “the system”, so to speak?
Erwan I’ve got this problem that somehow I’m always “in” my practice. I’m not doing a proper job of trying to identify things and separate them out, whereas the world today needs things to be branded – everything has to be very clearly identified. I’m just happy to bring all these different things together, but six months from now these works will have probably moved into something else. These things are not stable and I would happily show the work from the farm with the new Pier shelving that we designed for Hay – honestly, to me, they all go together like a big family. I love things being layered on top of one another. In the past I felt more able to individually brand a concept, whereas now I’m more about overlaying everything. I’m looking for a more general concept within that overlay, rather than within individual elements.
Johanna One aspect of that overlay is that you’re mixing these physical works that are very situated in nature with a lot of digital artwork. How do the two connect?
Erwan The way I’m coding is exactly like nature. Nature repeats a tiny number of operations all the time, with tiny deformations and adaptations. That’s very similar to coding, which is just setting a number of operations that you’re going to repeat. One of the things that is interesting about coding is that you can quickly produce a million steps, but input some perturbation, which creates an interesting pattern. That’s not so far from the perturbations you get in nature. So, for me, coding and nature fit together quite easily. I see the digital as a tool to explore complexity.
Image: Charles Pétillon.
Johanna How does that work in The Wanderer ITW (Into the Wild)? In that series you have different circles interacting with each other.
Erwan So those circular elements try to avoid touching one another. I’m looking for simple rules of movement: if you meet something, try to avoid it. Strangely, what I have discovered, however, is that this point of avoidance creates some form of attraction. When those elements run away from each other, they end up becoming stuck in a tiny area, and one of the perspectives I’m getting from being here and doing this kind of work is a sense of a much more complex ecology. There are more parameters, but they somehow don’t build into an overbearing complexity. It’s a little bit the opposite: they’re reinforcing certain parameters that allow you to end up in a proper balance. My ultimate dream is to create some software to ensure that no drawing would ever be repeated.
Johanna So the artworks would be self-generating?
Erwan It’s a little bit more complicated than that. If you let things self-generate, you’re just putting the computer on and getting signals back in return. But with these works, I’m always checking, adding things, changing parameters. It’s a little bit like being in front of a CNC machine. I’m there, but there are also random factors at play and I’m very happy to see the direction in which things go from there. It’s building the spirit of a practice, rather than just building a final result. I’m letting rules play out and, through that, you discover many things. It’s a kind of conceptual art in which you establish rules, and then follow those through to the very end. You can get a visual complexity from that, but what I really like is how you can dig into the rules or the conceptual statement, which for me is necessary. Ronan bases everything in his artworks on the voice of his hand and is very into a handmade practice, but that’s very different to me. I’m always tweaking the software so that it’s unstable. I like art with a conceptual background; I’m a little bit more lost with art that has a more romantic background.
A work from The Impossible series, elements of which are sold through The Wrong Shop (image courtesy of Erwan Bouroullec).
Johanna Is it very intentional for you that these series of works all look so different? The Wanderer is very different to The Impossible, which combines photography with block colours.
Erwan I guess it is intentional. In general, I find quite a lot of limits inside product design – with product design it’s very difficult not to be elegant. But with these works I’m looking for something a bit more dirty or muddy. I’m looking for something impolite that can blur things, because contrast is something that I find interesting. I want these works to not be precious by their nature.
Johanna That seems reflected in the way you print these pieces. It’s quite casual: they’re kind of scrunched up, or else are printed on fabrics. Is that also part of your desire to re-evaluate the outcomes of these processes?
Erwan One of the problems with contemporary art is that people can’t really handle it. There are so many contrasts between the price of the thing and its physicality. I’m just trying to do things that have a kind of easiness inside the roughness. Right now, I’m thinking that I should print some very big canvases with the people who print graphics on trucks, for example. I don’t give a shit about printing quality or colour quality, or at least not in the usual way.
The Burgundy landscape around La Grange (image: Charles Pétillon).
Johanna You don’t want control of it?
Erwan Some printers have asked me if they’ve printed these works in the right colour. But there is no right colour because I’ve been doing them on multiple screens, all of which display colour differently. I’m happy not having 100 per cent control of the process. Roughness gives a certain conceptual easiness. There’s an artist I have always admired called Claude Viallat. He used to paint on canvases, but those would be dented or whatever – they weren’t pristine – and I always loved Frank Stella because he also moved out of typical canvases. You then have people like Robert Smithson, who literally poured glue out onto the landscape [Glue Pour, 1969, ed.]. That was always very attractive to me in terms of its impoliteness towards nature. I would be happy to bring students here and tell them to do literally anything with whatever they can find here.
Johanna And is that because you feel that that freedom is ultimately lacking in design education and our everyday lives?
Erwan I feel very concerned with the growing complexity of progress. So many things look literally impossible to practice now. But you can just practise without too much thinking; you can practise by just being on site and making. Face the reality that is in front of you.
As I get ready to leave and catch the TGV back to Paris, the skies suddenly open. The oppressive heat of the last 24 hours evaporates and it feels easier to breathe again. It’s like a lid has been lifted. Bouroullec’s daughters run into the rain, jumping around, laughing, faces to the sky. Looking at them, he says, “Sensation. That’s what I’m talking about.”
Words Johanna Agerman Ross
Photographs Philippe Thibault, Charles Pétillon, Charlotte Vuarnesson and Erwan Bouroullec
This article was originally published in Disegno #34. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.