In this beautiful book, product and furniture designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec present an assortment of works on paper – everything from doodles and diagrams that explore form and texture to drawings that seek to solve technical problems and cost calculations. Even the latter are wonderfully illustrated.
While the drawings hint at the products found in the French designers’ prolific portfolio – including such gems as the Vegetal, the tree-like chair for Vitra, or the felt partitions for Kvadrat called Clouds – more often than not the sketches are quietly enigmatic. What role each played in the development of some idea or another is left unexplained, leaving it up to readers to imagine how they materialized on the road to becoming one of the Bouroullecs’ well-known designs.
Swiss graphic designer and the book’s author Cornel Windlin describes his first encounter with the drawings when the brothers asked him to compile the sketches to create this book, titled simply Drawing. “I had no idea how many sketchbooks they had filled over the years, and how they kept them carefully labelled and fastidiously archived in tidy binders, with their loose-leaf sheets diligently arranged in acid-free archival boxes.
“I had no idea how important this constant activity is for them, and how it always had been a defining characteristic of their collaboration. And I certainly had no idea how to make it all into a book.”
The result is a trove of elegant images hand-rendered in felt-tipped pen, pencil and ballpoint pen that reveals the designers’ creative and poetic way of working and thinking.
Drawing is published by JRP Ringier.