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Florian Kräutli

Awarded

Florian Kräutli

'Magnetic Curtain'

Product and Industrial Design

Jury report

Magnetic Appeal
Our liv­ing spaces are flooded by in­vis­i­ble and om­nipresent elec­tro­mag­netic fields. This set Flo­rian Kräutli won­der­ing how those spaces might look if they were struc­tured not by light but by the spec­trum of the elec­tro­mag­netic field. It was this cu­rios­ity, and a few ex­per­i­ments, that sparked his idea for a mal­leable tex­tile shaped by mag­netic forces. And so the Mag­netic Cur­tain came to be.
Born in Win­terthur, Kräutli grad­u­ated from the De­sign Acad­emy of Eind­hoven in the sum­mer of 2009. In de­sign­ing his ob­jects, he is in­ter­ested pri­mar­ily in the process it­self; he ob­serves it, in­ter­ven­ing only where nec­es­sary. It is this fun­da­men­tally in­tel­lec­tual ap­proach to the task in hand that lends his de­signs their un­usual and dis­tinc­tive edge.
The Mag­netic Cur­tain can be mod­elled into any shape. Its built-in struc­tural com­po­nents keep it in the de­sired form that has been cre­ated by push­ing and pulling the ma­te­r­ial into shape. The cur­tain is stud­ded with tiny golden mag­nets sewn onto the fab­ric in geo­met­ri­cal align­ments. The mag­nets are strong enough to keep the re­quired shape sta­ble while at the same time easy enough to pull apart quickly so that the cur­tain can be re­turned to its orig­i­nal form at any time. A clever sys­tem of plas­tic tri­an­gles sewn in­side the soft fab­ric pre­vents the mag­nets from click­ing to­gether un­con­trol­lably. In short, this is or­gan­ised chaos.
The Mag­netic Cur­tain has many po­ten­tial uses: as a clas­sic win­dow adorn­ment, as a room di­vider or even as a wardrobe shell. As an ob­ject, this ver­sa­tile cur­tain, whose form can be changed with ease, has an ap­peal that is both play­ful and sen­sual. It is al­most im­pos­si­ble to walk past it with­out feel­ing an ir­re­sistible temp­ta­tion to alter its sculp­tural shape and take de­light in the quiet snap of the mag­nets.
Dutch de­sign label Droog sat up and took no­tice the mo­ment the Mag­netic Cur­tain was posted on a de­sign blog, and ap­proached the young de­signer the very same day with a view to in­clud­ing it in their col­lec­tion.
Anna Niederhäuser

Biography

Florian Kräutli
Born in
1985Education
BA of Design, Department Man and Living
(Design Academy Eindhoven, NL)

Web

www.kraeutli.com

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