When visitors arrived at the Steelcase pop up in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, they stepped into a room that looked as if it had been wrapped in crumpled metal.
Disguised in the room were the iconic low, sculptural Jean Nouvel seating collection from Coalesse meticulously upholstered in what looked like matching tin foil.
“The miracles of digital printing allow you to kind of do anything you like,” the materials designer Tom Dixon told me, somewhat weary eyed from his recent flight from England to Miami. “We tried a few different textures, we tried hair, we tried rocks,” Tom says, describing the experiments for the Miami Art Week debut.
The collaboration brings Tom together with Coalesse and the applied materials manufacturer Designtex. Working with their digital studio in Portland, Maine, Tom produced high resolution images of crumpled materials that Designtex then translated into fabric. Eventually they landed on aluminium photographs to create an intricate pattern that could be smoothly upholstered over the furniture’s complex curves.
When visitors arrived at the Steelcase pop up in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, they stepped into a room that looked as if it had been wrapped in crumpled metal. Photo courtesy of Steelcase
“The objective of the custom fabric is camouflage,” Tom said. “I know Jean Nouvel loves aluminum and I know his design for Coalesse is very difficult to upholster due to its rounded forms. So I set about trying to find a pattern that would work with the complex upholstery needed. By crumpling up a sheet of aluminum, you’re getting a randomized pattern that allows you to camouflage the seams.”
Inside the pop up, the furniture reads somewhere between stage set and product prototype, in line with Coalesse’s role inside the Steelcase family as a brand focused on modern furnishings for the places people gather.
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- The Groove chair is the democratic sequel to Hydro. “I finally managed to create a chair at around $300. It’s comfortable. It still has this idea of industrial decoration,” Tom says.
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- The groove itself began as a structural stiffener pressed into thin metal by an industrial robot; over time he exaggerated and tuned it until it became both ornament and ergonomics. Photos courtesy of Steelcase
Just outside visitors walked through the Groove Garden, a small field of Tom’s new outdoor collection. The metal chairs carried a repeating raised ridge that nods to art deco detailing and the corrugations of industrial sheet metal. The form is the outcome of a decade long attempt to arrive at an efficient, comfortable metal chair, a path that has run through robots, high tech forming, and a partnership with Norwegian aluminum company Hydro. That earlier Hydro chair used superforming and 100 percent recycled aluminum; it was extremely light and beautiful, but at around $2,000, not especially practical.
Groove is the more democratic sequel. “I finally managed to create a chair at around $300. It’s comfortable. It still has this idea of industrial decoration,” Tom says. The groove itself began as a structural stiffener pressed into thin metal by an industrial robot; over time he exaggerated and tuned it until it became both ornament and ergonomics.
Melt portable lamp by Tom Dixon for Coalesse. Photo courtesy of Steelcase
Hydro’s material research still sits in the background. “Aluminum is one of the few materials that really is recyclable,” Tom says. That same attitude toward resourcefulness shows up in his current obsession with portable, battery powered lighting. “Portables are a big theme right now. I think it’s driven partly by COVID, where all the restaurants suddenly went outdoors and there were no lights, so there was this explosion in portability. This kind of mirrors what’s going on in the workforce. You can work from anywhere on your tablet or phone.”
tomdixon.net, coalesse.com, steelcase.com, designtex.com, hydro.com
