Philia & Kids showcases furniture designed by children

Designers Antoine Behaghel and Alexis Foiny have created sculptural olive wooden furnishings primarily based solely on drawings by youngsters for a Galerie Philia exhibition.

Design Brut: Philia & Youngsters is the inaugural programme of a non-profit initiative conceived by worldwide artwork gallery Galerie Philia that goals to interact youngsters in design.

The venture’s first version invited 19 youngsters from a major faculty within the Breil-sur-Roya village in France to design sculptural furnishings that was exhibited at Espace Meyer Zafra in Paris from November till final week.

Knowledgeable by the late French painter Jean Dubuffet, the initiative is known as after artwork brut – or “uncooked artwork” – Dubuffet’s identify for artwork created exterior of educational limitations, reminiscent of artwork made by youngsters.

Contributors aged six to seven took half in a workshop over 5 months, the place they had been requested to attract their very own interpretations of sculptural design beneath the supervision of BehaghelFoiny Studio founders Antoine Behaghel and Alexis Foiny and their trainer Virgile Ganne.

The drawings vary from a crocodile-like bench to vibrant eating chairs and spikier, extra summary types.

“A number of shepherds’ youngsters drew hooves on the legs of the furnishings, or horns on the backs of the chairs,” seen Behaghel and Foiny.

“Others, dwelling close to olive groves and the encircling forest, drew leaves and branches on their furnishings,” they instructed Dezeen.

The designers defined that they inspired the children to “assert their very own creativity” in addition to observe their classmates’ drawings and borrow types from one another to make the design expertise collaborative.

“In opposition to all odds, we realised that, when confronted with furnishings design, the kids’s first intentions had been reasonably smart, and copied the shapes of furnishings they noticed each day,” they mentioned.

After this, Behaghel and Foiny sorted the drawings into totally different furnishings typologies together with tables, chairs, stools, coat racks and pedestal tables, in addition to categorising the creations by “spirits and kinds”.

The pair then labored with a cabinetmaker in Breil-sur-Roya to deliver the drawings to life by making bodily furnishings out of native olive wooden.

“In some locations, we shrank or enlarged the silhouettes drawn by the kids, to higher distribute the load,” famous the designers.

Throughout this course of, the kids had been taken on a tour of a neighborhood sawmill and proven each stage of the manufacturing course of to be able to familiarise them with carpentry.

Behaghel and Foiny defined that olive wooden was chosen for its cultural significance to Breil-sur-Roya, which is named the “pays des oliviers” (olive tree nation).

The designers painted the fabric in numerous vibrant shades that aimed to subtly tint, reasonably than conceal, its veiny floor.

“It appeared to us very related to affiliate the intervention of very younger youngsters wiht a thousand-year-old wooden!” famous the designers.

The pair hopes that the workshop may have taught the kids in regards to the significance of furnishings design whereas showcasing their private creativity with out limitations.

“In the long run, the kids’s drawings confirmed an actual spontaneity,” mirrored Behaghel and Foiny.

“They’re each free from technical reflexes and due to this fact led us to take dangers and on the similar time indifferent from the aesthetic automatisms that we impose on ourselves roughly consciously as skilled designers,” they added.

“They led us to extract ourselves from standardisation of tastes and wonder, to play extra with imbalances and proportions.”

This isn’t the primary time that youngsters have tried their hand at chair design. Third and fourth graders at a college in New York have designed plenty of seating collections beneath the supervision of artwork teacher Bruce Edelstein, together with chairs with horns and different wood seats.

The images is by Maison Mouton Noir. 

Design Brut: Philia & Youngsters was on show at Espace Meyer Zafra from 10 November to eight December 2022. See Dezeen Occasions Information for an up-to-date listing of structure and design occasions happening world wide.