CONTINUAattheLOUVRE
Momentané Musée des Arts Décoratifs 107 rue de Rivoli, Paris (26 April ‐ 1 September 2013) If you chose to spend your summer holidays in Paris, then you’ll almost certainly have visited the Louvre Museum, the quadrilateral courtyards enclosed by the vast palace and the adjacent Tuileries garden leading to the Place de la Concorde. And you’ll probably have been amazed to see, in one of the renaissance wings of the Louvre palace, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (entrance in Rue de Rivoli 107), an exhibition of 120x120 cm ceramic tiles made using Continua technology. The exhibition in question, Momentané by the brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, was a vast collection of projects celebrating 15 years of close collaboration between these two French designers. The exhibition wound its way across 1000 m2 of floor space, its focal point being the central aisle of the museum where Ronan and Erwan had set up a gigantic 12‐metre‐high textile structure made up of Algues, North Tiles, Twigs and Clouds partitioning systems designed for Vitra and for Kvadrat. Some 100 pieces were on show in the aisle on the Rivoli side, ranging from an extensive selection of objects, furnishings and lights to numerous original models; on the opposite side, which overlooks the Tuileries garden, the Bouroullec brothers had, instead, placed set‐ups designed for public spaces and work areas, such as the Joyn system for Vitra and the more recent Workbay and Cork Table, plus furnishings produced by Hay and designed especially for the new University of Copenhagen. Next to these industrial works of art lay the outstanding Pino ceramic collection, designed for Mutina and made using Continua technology; this collection represents the Bouroullec brothers’ debut in ceramic design for floor and wall use. Ronan Bouroullec’s comments on the innovative forming technology developed by SACMI are captivating: “Continua belongs to that group of machines every designer hopes to meet one day. It’s rather like meeting a sort of ‘monster’ that, at one end, gobbles up the powder and, at the other, relinquishes the finished product. More like a perfectly choreographed dance than a production process, Continua transforms, without any human intervention, a raw material into a finished object. A succession of tasks is completed with startling precision thanks to the advent of all those “magic” processes that transform dreamed‐of projects into ‘tangible’ objects’”. The French studio worked on the collection with the idea of coming up with a product that would be free from the typical coldness of ceramic surfaces, allowing them to focus on the atypical potential of lining materials. The Bouroullecs designed it with an eye to residential use, but also public outdoor solutions. “Over the years the ceramic industry has largely produced ‘cold’ surfaces that conceal the depth of the materials. Going against the trend, Pico puts the raw material ‐ the powder and the compressed minerals that form the very essence of the ceramic tile ‐ back in the limelight. Our goal is to maintain the rough, raw feel of earth or cement floors so that the material can express its naturally inherent qualities”. In conceiving this collection, in the natural base colours of “Blanc”, “Gris” and “Terre”, every effort was made to define a structure that matches and balances regularity with irregularity. Pico stands out on account of soft‐to‐
the‐touch surfaces that use two types of relief: “Down” with dimples and “Up” with raised dots. Both types can also be seen in the SACMI Research Centre exhibition area.