Best Meditations: Wallpaper* Design Awards 2021

Swedish design studio Note and Spanish furniture brand Sancal have taken their decade-long partnership to the next level with the Void Matters furniture collection. ‘What defines an object?’ wondered Note founders Cristiano Pigazzini and Johannes Carlström. Is it the matter itself, they asked, or the empty space that surrounds it? In search of an answer, they developed the collection, featuring a series of furniture pieces and objects born from personal research and experiment, eschewing a traditional design brief.

‘We wanted to put the emphasis on nothing; specifically, on the negative space surrounding physical objects,’ says Pigazzini. Acknowledging empty space brings it into the design process, making it as relevant as the objects themselves, he notes. ‘While positive shapes often are associated with strong and active qualities, negative space is calm and peaceful, and leaves room for interpretation. Our thesis was that the juxtaposition of these two relative spaces would bring something new and thought-provoking to a room.’

This concept is developed over four furniture families, or ‘meditations on emptiness’, as the pair dub them. The collection comprises two seating series, ‘Core’ and ‘Remnant’, designed (and named) to indicate two opposite forms of the same shape; the sculptural ‘Vestige’ tables, each with a void in their base; and ‘Dividuals’, a series of poufs defined by two intersecting designs that can be combined and arranged into multiple compositions.

The collection also includes a series of limited-edition abstract ceramic sculptures. Made by hand with clay from Totana, a Spanish town with a craft tradition dating back to the Middle Ages, the sculptures offer a three-dimensional representation of the designers’ sketching and prototyping processes.

INFORMATION

notedesignstudio.se
sancal.com