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A C E

Awarded

A C E: Camille Blin / Emmanuel Mbessé / Arnault Weber

'Collection 1', furniture collection

Product and Industrial Design

Jury report

Three Aces of Design
The A C E Stu­dio has won the Fed­eral Prize for De­sign with a six-piece fur­ni­ture col­lec­tion. A C E is made up of the three in­dus­trial de­sign­ers Ar­nault Weber, Camille Blin and Em­manuel Mbessé who com­pleted their train­ing course at the ECAL to­gether in 2009.The in­tel­li­gently com­bined 'Col­lec­tion 1' con­sists of a chair, a self-sup­port­ing shelf, a table, a cof­fee table and two lamps. The most strik­ing fea­ture is the chair whose back­rest is that of a bench. It gives the per­son sit­ting in it ad­di­tional el­bow­room on both sides when rest­ing their arms and thus makes for healthy dy­nam­ics even when sit­ting over long pe­ri­ods of time.It is the first ven­ture of a fur­ni­ture com­pany founded by A C E which prin­ci­pally aims at sus­tain­abil­ity rather than quick prof­its. For the fur­ni­ture, in­dige­nous ash wood (solid or lam­i­nated and glued but not joint plates) was used, a type of wood which, un­like other conifers, is not used often.In ad­di­tion, the de­sign­ers made a point of only work­ing with local crafts­men. For the co-pro­duc­tion with them, they ex­clu­sively used al­ready ex­ist­ing medium-sized pro­duc­tion ma­chin­ery. Since the aes­thetic of A C E is thus in­flu­enced by the pro­duc­tion equip­ment, clear geo­met­ric forms pre­vail whose sim­plic­ity also man­i­fests it­self in the ex­e­cu­tion. The fur­ni­ture is as­sem­bled by the sim­plest method pos­si­ble, and the joints of the fur­ni­ture too at­test to the high qual­ity of the work of A C E.The three part­ners pur­sue their am­bi­tious plan of work­ing to­gether with de­sign­ers of their gen­er­a­tion, thereby pro­vid­ing them with an op­por­tu­nity to ben­e­fit from the know-how of Swiss crafts­men. The new ob­jects, com­plet­ing the first col­lec­tion, are going to be re­vealed grad­u­ally.
Anna Niederhäuser   

Biography

Camille Blin
Born in
2011
Education
Industrial Designer

Emmanuel Mbessé
Born in
1983
Education
Industrial Designer
Group name
A C E

Arnault Weber
Born in
1985
Education
Industrial Designer
Group name
A C E

also in

2017

2021

2022

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