Maarten Van Severen Chair

2015 marks the tenth anniversary of Maarten Van Severen’s death, which is why The Maarten Van Severen Foundation and the Department of  Design of KASK / School of Arts Ghent have decided to establish a chair with the aim of conveying the relevance and significance of the designer’s work for today’s designers. Every year a leading designer, whose work has an affinity with the work of Maarten Van Severen, will give two lectures and a masterclass.  He or she will reflect on the common ground between their work and that of Maarten van Severen and on the qualities of his work in light of the current design culture.
The French brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec will be the first to hold the Maarten Van Severen Chair. The Bouroullecs have been working as designers since the late Nineties. Like Maarten Van Severen they have a long-standing partnership with the Swiss furniture manufacturer Vitra, resulting in such designs as the Joyn office system (2002), the Alcove Sofa (2007) and the Vegetal Chair (2009). Despite the generation gap their work undeniably has elements in common with that of Maarten Van Severen, not in the least because of the directness of their formal language but also for example because of their fondness for “nomadic” furniture (in the sense of movable furniture as a defining characteristic of a space), their preference for modular systems or their affinity with industrial and artisanal production processes.