Before Lukas Cober began making furniture, he was shaping surfboards as a teenager. It was there that he first got his hands into fiberglass and resin, long before it occurred to him to turn that fluency into a design practice.
Lukas grew up in Aachen, Germany, studied product design at the Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts and Design, and spent several years working as an assistant to artist and designer Valentin Loellmann before founding his studio in 2018. His New Wave bookshelf came out of an urge to work more hands-on, and an interest in what the material wanted to do rather than imposing a shape on it from the outside.
“The New Wave’s design is guided by the material and the technique,” says Lukas. “I feel it sits somewhere between neo avant-garde and brutalism.”
The bookshelf is built by hand-layering sheets of fiberglass with resin, then worked back with angle grinders and sanding machines until smooth transitions and organic contours emerge. As material is removed, the layered structure reveals itself: rhythmic lines running across the surface like a swell hitting a coastline. The whole thing is made from start to finish in Lukas’ studio in Maastricht, The Netherlands and takes around three months per piece. No two come out the same.
The spirit of it connects to what Ron Arad and a loose circle of designers were doing in 1980s London, making furniture by hand from raw and unconventional materials and putting the process front and center.
A version of this article originally appeared in Sixtysix Issue 16.
