The Bouroullec Brothers: Fox and Hedgehog
In a bizarre and endearing moment of self-definition, the Bouroullecs once described themselves the ‘Fox’ (Ronan) and the ‘Hedgehog’ (Erwan), employing philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s categorisation of intellectuals, which divides them into ‘Foxes’, who know ‘many things’ and ‘Hedgehogs’, who know ‘one big thing’.
We used this as our starting point...
The Fox: Ronan Bouroullec
The elder of the Brittany-born brothers, Ronan, 40, sits cross-legged opposite me. ‘It’s quite a brutal description isn’t it?’ he asks weighing every word. Ronan’s socks are Red-Riding-Hood red. We are sitting without shoes in the Raphael Gallery of the V&A on the Bouroullecs’ Textile Field installation, a vast, gently inclined carpet of upholstery in green and blue. This is the duo’s third collaboration with Danish manufacturer Kvadrat – the one before this was the sublime Clouds project in 2008, a shape-shifting creation that blurred the boundaries between furniture and fabric.
Clouds allowed users to form it into abstract forms. It has a typical Bouroullec cleverness with a puzzle-like twist. Clouds invites no definition. It is entre chien et loup, a French expression for the time of day just before night, when the light is so dim you can’t distinguish a dog from a wolf. It applies to the unfathomed gap that exists between the familiar and the unknown, the comfortable and the strange, a place the Bouroullecs creatively inhabit.
The Bouroullecs reached something of a zenith in 2011. Their first major retrospective in France, Bivouac, opened in the Pompidou-Metz and runs until this July. It is a 930 sq m tribute to the past 10 years of their work, at the Shigeru Ban-designed Lorraine annexe of the Pompidou Centre, with the monographic show featuring more than 300 objects, drawings and experiments.
Ronan, smartly dressed in slacks and a shirt, is the more serious of the two. He is precise. ‘It is hard and difficult to be in a relationship with a piece,’ he explains, a little sullenly. ‘You need sensuality to understand anything.’ He was the first of the two to become a designer after leaving the family home in Quimper, off to study furniture design at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
Acclaim came early for the brothers. In 1997, the year they began working together, they presented Disintegrated Kitchen at the Salon du Meuble in Paris. It was here that they were spotted by Giulio Cappellini, an encounter which led to their first major industrial design projects, including Closed Bed and Spring Chair. Ronan likens the Bouroullec design process from idée to réalisation as ‘a chaos we control’. It is revelation that sits in stark contrast to the delicate intelligence and simplicity of the completed work. ‘There is no formula,’ says Ronan, describing how the fluidity between the initial thinking, drawings and 3D modelling repeats itself in a loop until both brothers are satisfied. ‘We never compromise with each other,’ he says. ‘We are violent with ourselves and each other in order to do something correct.’ You cannot imagine Ronan and Erwan apart though. ‘We argue with ourselves and each other but that passion is necessary for what we have to do.’
Ronan’s creative outlook mirrors his interpretation of the wider world as a place of chaos. ‘Design is a method of communication that creates a picture on a white card in a world that is a jungle with barely controlled political systems,’ he says.
In January 2011, Ronan and Erwan marked a change in direction with their Ploum sofa for Ligne Roset – a simple sponge-like piece created from just two pieces of stretched, foam-backed fabric. ‘A voluptuous piece of fruit,’ extoles Ronan, savouring every word. ‘That is why I like fabric so much. In a bed we eat, we sleep, we have sex. We have so many different relationships to it.’ There was also a contemporary re-imagining of a kilim rug. Losange, for carpet producer Nanimarquina, was designed in the Bouroullecs’ studio and hand-made by village craftsmen in northern Pakistan. Kilims combine 13 colours in striking tessellated diamond-shaped patterns, using Afghan wool. Losange highlights not just unique colour tones but also imperfections – a luxury for the Bouroullecs, so used to working within the perfectionist parameters of European über design. ‘I am fascinated by the imprecisions,’ reveals Ronan. ‘There is a certain freedom in it.’
Unlike his brother, Ronan doesn’t like travelling and he had recently spent an uncomfortable two days on the 20th floor of a hotel in Shanghai: ‘It is a vertical city and I don’t like tall buildings.’ For Ronan, Shanghai is a city where the future is happening so fast he doesn’t understand how people can keep up. ‘I’m both scared and fascinated by this and by technology,’ he says as we discuss future shock. ‘We are in a spectacular period where the speed of communication allows for things that we could never have imagined before.’
Perhaps their most intriguing project is yet to come – a contemporary addition to the dramatic Gabriel staircase at the Château de Versailles outside Paris. Originally designed in 1772 by architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel, the staircase leading to the royal apartments was only completed in 1985. The commission, already courting political controversy from traditionalists, marries pure art with absolute design. ‘A good designer is like a good artist. The relationship between art and design comes out of the same energy and the same passion,’ Ronan insists. ‘Art has a visionary point of view. Our discipline is to create functionalities.’
It has been suggested that the idiosyncrasies that characterise the pair’s current projects are part of a manifestation of a mid-life crisis. ‘It is true that maturity has brought with it a certain restlessness but there is much work to be done. Erwan is a romantic,’ Ronan says. ‘I don’t know how I would describe myself. People call me a perfectionist, but I don’t agree.’
The Hedgehog: Erwan Bouroullec
The more relaxed and playful of the brothers, Erwan is telling me why he won’t teach. ‘Ronan has been approached,’ the 35 year old says. ‘I remember a picture of the Cultural Revolution in China of teachers being beaten by their students. It scared me!’ Maybe it was the thought of re-education by fervent young Maoists but we have to pause the interview. Erwan wants to nip outside for a cigarette.
It is nearing the end of the day and the crowds are filing past us out of the V&A. ‘I like to understand the way people speak, walk and eat,’ he says after taking a drag on his cigarette. In the gathering autumnal dusk Erwan looks detached as he runs his fingers through his beard as he smokes. ‘I’m not interested in cities,’ Erwan says. ‘But I love watching people.’
It was 1997 when younger brother Erwan helped Ronan realise his first projects. Erwan studied Fine Art at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Cergy-Pontoise, and his art background permeates his thinking. Erwan has never subscribed to any design theory; the brothers had an immediate synergy and a creative relationship was born. It is difficult not to see the Bouroullecs’ body of work as nothing less than a realisation in form and space of a profound relationship.
One of the Bouroullecs most enduring relationships has been with Vitra, whose chairman, Rolf Fehlbaum, asked them in 2000 to begin work on what became the still-evolving innovative office-system series Joyn for hot-desking, flexitime workers. ‘People ask us “Why are the Bouroullecs doing another project with Vitra?”’ he says. ‘It might look like we are all old friends, but we fight our corner.’
‘We love the idea of a product that is dynamic and does not belong to a space,’ Erwan reveals as he describes one of the few interior design projects they have done – the Dos Palillos restaurant in the Casa Camper Hotel, Berlin, in 2009: ‘We provided a hardcore, simple wooden structure without any decoration because we wanted life to grow in it.’
At the moment Erwan has been thinking about how children search for storytelling details in objects. He has a young daughter. ‘She uses her environment in a practical way,’ he says, but won’t entertain the idea of designing for children. ‘Someone said that we are in the midst of a mid-life crisis,’ he confesses, which he ascribes to what he terms the ‘pure thinking’ inherent in Western societies that has become more pronounced in the face of globalisation. He says this has brought both freedom and entrapment: ‘Fifty years ago 50 people would produce a car. Today 10,000 people are involved across the world yet none of them are able to sum up the car’s value. People are losing touch with the fundamentals of reality.’
Erwan does not like overriding systems, be they intellectual or political: ‘When the decision is the small part of the cloud, detached from everyone, it makes life stranger and more fake. There is no need for an upper rule. I think everything should be less organised than it is. I dream of a type of democracy based only on small decisions.’
This Bouroullec believes that the new century brings an opportunity for new intellectual enterprise, a new age of enlightenment at a time when mediocrity is in the ascendant. ‘I am not thinking of conquering the West,’ Erwan says, laughing, but he is intrigued by the possibility of a new type of frontierism. That said, he adds, ‘Sometimes I feel that if you are looking at Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was quite visionary, this white, clean, efficient future is just not going to happen.’
While Erwan admires technology he doesn’t want design or art to be dictated by it. We are talking about David Hockney’s digital paintings, Fresh Flowers, created using an iPad and displayed in Paris last year. ‘It’s the strange life of designers that we work so closely with machines yet are afraid of them,’ he says and mentions a book he is reading – Grand Junction, by Maurice Dantec, set in a cyberpunk world controlled by an artificial intelligence. ‘It raises the question of being a prisoner of technology,’ he says.
But the Bouroullecs are not technophobes. To coincide with the Metz exhibition, they have created an iPad app that gives viewers a grand tour of their best work. Called Cercles, the app presents more than 200 images including products, drawings and models. Double-tap on any given design and you are presented with the work in such detail that you can examine individual fibres.
Erwan might be prickly when it comes to technology, but he quite likes being described as a Hedgehog (Ibsen, Proust, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche share the same characteristic). The classification does throws light on his singular aesthetic approach: despite being a man with the ‘big idea’, he doesn’t take it seriously. As well as his current sci-fi novel, Erwan also admits to reading fairy stories: ‘I’m a romantic,’ he admits, but then stops himself and adds, ‘but probably not very.’ And how would he sum up Ronan after 15 years of working together? ‘I don’t have a good word for him yet,’ he says smiling and reaching for another cigarette.
