23 November 2009

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Patrick Jouin: 100 per cent French design!


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Talking about French design some years ago, Alessandro Mendini compared it to a sad grey building where French architects gathered glumly at the windows to gaze down upon the cheerful parade of other countries going past. The situation is somewhat different today. Philippe Starck is a contemporary icon, his work unarguably synonymous with taste and originality. But he’s far from alone, since in the last ten years a wave of new talent has swept France forward from the position of onlooker onto the front stage of international design.
One of these new talents is without doubt Patrick Jouin. Born in Nantes in 1967 and graduating in 1992 from Paris’s ENSCI-les Ateliers (the French national institute for advanced studies in industrial design), from 1995 to 1998 he worked together with Philippe Starck before deciding to open his own planning and design studio in Paris in 1999. His fresh and elegant style soon caught the eye both of professionals in the field and lovers of good design, thanks in part to the meeting with Alain Ducasse that marked the beginning of a fortunate and highly fruitful partnership.
Ducasse, one of the great names in French cuisine, hired Jouin to design and decorate the interiors of several of his chain’s restaurants, and the result has been the creation of interiors that can be considered virtually a programmatic manifesto for the idea of linking culinary art with contemporary design, offering an experience which in terms of sophistication and “good taste” goes far beyond the merely gastronomic.

This was the ambition, for instance, that lay behind Mix in Las Vegas, where, in perfect balance between style and tradition, dominated by an enormous chandelier of 15,000 blown-glass spheres, an atmosphere is created that offers elegance and luxury without going over the top. The Plaza Athénée in Paris and St. Tropez’s Spoon Byblos were similarly effective projects, while more recently the renovation of the  
Jules Verne involved having to find a decorative solution that took into account the stunning view of Paris that the second floor of the Eiffel Tower commands. Meanwhile, for the restaurant of London’s Dorchester Hotel, he succeeded in conjuring up a luxurious environment not through the use of crystal or gold but simply by a judiciously calibrated combination of everyday materials.

The most striking thing about Jouin’s work, both in his interior design projects and in his own designer objects, is the freshness and modernity of his aesthetic solutions, invariably matched to a harmony and elegance that is almost classical in feel.
Awards and recognition have not been slow to arrive: in 2003 he won “Maison & Objet”’s “Designer of the year” award and more recently in San Paolo in Brazil an exhibition was held, “Le Paris de Patrick Jouin”, featuring 150 objects and over 50 projects, testament to his rapid rise on the contemporary design scene.

Some of his projects have already been included in prestigious collections such as MOMA and the POMPIDOU CENTRE and, in terms of the innovative technology employed and originality of formal invention, several of his objects would be quite at home in an art gallery.  With the MGX “Solid” series, for instance, Jouin took the laser stereolitography and transformed it from a fast prototyping technique into a real method of production.
Experimentation with new technologies however is never allowed to interfere with the overall aesthetic result, and his design is always inspired by play, poetry or nature. Perhaps this is one reason why Jouin’s style has been particularly appreciated by some Italian companies who notoriously take painstaking care with the design of their products: designing the Labeau table for CASSINA, and, for KARTELL, working on Thalya, the re-edition of a historical model of seat realised in polycarbonate with gas injection technology.
His designs for MURANO DUE, a brand of Firme di Vetro, are particularly evocative, even poetic, in which a taste for purity and elegance of form has been perfectly translated by Jouin into products such as Ether, a marvellous cascade of drops of light, or Mercure, which uses the smooth form of mercury drops. The French designer has also recently designed Reed for Mercure, a system of illumination based on five modular elements which, rather like a new alphabet, makes it possible to create infinite lighting solutions for every requirement.

Perhaps it’s still too early to say that the pupil Jouin has outstripped the master Starck: but we’re certainly going to hear a lot more about this fascinating young designer whose talent has helped French design down from the windows and into the parade.
Ripalta Borrelli