The playful approach to materiality that Bratislava-based studio Crafting Plastics are known for came about where most great ideas happen — in the kitchen. The design studio was formed in the home of co-founder Vlasta Kubušová where the pluck that comes with being young and low on funds contributed to their experimentation with organic materials.
“When you are a design student you want to try and experiment with something new,” Kubušová tells RUSSH. “You either have to have enough money to buy new things, or you have to look around and start to work with things that are not costly, and use the tools that are just around you. People say the digital revolution started in garages, and that the new materials revolution is starting in the kitchen.”
RUSSH met the Crafting Plastics team in Miami, as the most exciting players in the global art and design world descended on the hedonistic beach-fringed city for Art and Design Week. Luxury car company Lexus has been exhibiting at the annual fair for nine years, and this year, the makers of the world’s first luxury hybrid vehicle returned to the Magic City to debut Liminal Cycles, a three-pronged, multi-sensory, immersive collaboration with research and design studio Crafting Plastics, alongside a limited-edition capsule collection of objects by a bevy of emerging and established designers. At the heart of the collaboration was a sensory-responsive sculpture of a living, breathing car made from innovative sustainable materials, lighting up the lush sculpture garden of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami).
“Working with biomaterials, you are able to break them with your own hands, burn them down, build them back up, heat them, and use them as you wish,” Kubušová says. “We started to think, ‘Maybe we’ll be able to create the materials ourselves and then make products?’ So for us, design was never about the final object, it was always about the process.”
The central piece of the exhibition was a to-scale reimagining of the LF-ZC concept car crafted from an environmentally UV-responsive, 100 percent biodegradable material developed by Kubušová and her co-founder Miroslav Král. The colour of the car’s plant-based biopolymer exterior colour fluctuates in reaction to its environment and an aromatic mist exudes as it expands, contracts and pulsates. Nearby, a sculpture inspired by the steering wheel of the same car model is part alien life-form, part flower stamen and part reproductive organ. As I wrap my hand around it the bio-plastic lattice, which feels somewhat like skin, throbs and changes colour.
“When you touch something natural you don't expect it to be perfect,” Kubušová says. “And I think this imperfection is very interesting to explore with new materials and narratives. This kind of touch-feeling makes you feel that the product is natural.”
Lexus chose to work alongside Crafting Plastics precisely because of their interactive and personalised approach, which aligned with the company's values of sustainability, innovation, and human-centric design.
“We start every year with the process of what our message is going to be for that year,” says Heather Updegraff, general manager of Lexus International Strategic Communications. “This year, it's about the future, the promise of software-defined vehicles, which are personalised and customised, and all about the user's experience. Software defined vehicles are all about interactivity. The more we got to know about Crafting Plastics, the more we realised there are some really good synergies here between their practice and our branding in terms of sustainability and innovation and human centric design.”
Founder and creative director of Studio Kër Michael Bennett is one of the designers who collaborated with Lexus on a limited edition capsule collection of 26 design objects. Bennett, a former NFL player and Super Bowl champion is driven by design that draws “empathy for space.”
“I put the people first,” Bennett explained during a panel at ICA Miami alongside fellow designers Germane Barnes of Studio Barnes; and Tara Sakhi, founder of T Sakhi. Bennett, who stands 1.9 metres tall, went on to describe how, on a recent trip to Japan, he broke three chairs on account of his size. He says the experience compounded his practice of focussing on empathy and the people he designed for — a series of amber glass vessels titled Synesthesia, includes an architecturally designed candle holder he described as a “seat for light”.
Tara Sakhi’s Memory juxtaposes materials like the recycled aluminium from the damaged hood of a Lexus vehicle alongside “noble materials” such as gold leaf and murano glass questioning the idea of what luxury is. Germane Barnes, who, three years into collaborating with the brand, thinks of himself “as part of the Lexus family” chose the colour pink for his ceramic vessels, titled The Beauty of Labour, as a nod to the famed Art Deco buildings of Miami. Tying it all together is a signature Lexus in Design fragrance with notes of blood orange and bergamot , designed in collaboration with clean fragrance brand dilo.
“The world comes to Miami once a year in the first week of December,” Barnes says. “And you want to represent the city well, but you also want to represent the brand well, this felt like a way of colliding those things in a harmonious fashion.”
You can read more about Lexus' 'Liminal Cycles' installation at ICA Miami this year on the Lexus website.
