Piet Hein Eek - Aluminium collection

Designer: Piet Hein Eek

Piet Hein Eek was born in Hol­land in 1967 and was grad­u­ated from the Acad­emy for Indus­trial Design in Eind­hoven in 1990. While at the Acad­emy, he gained atten­tion for his exam project Scrap Wood Cup­boards. He sold all of the cup­boards and used the money to start his own design stu­dio in 1992. The fol­low­ing year he went into part­ner­ship with fel­low designer Nob Rui­jrok, estab­lish­ing Eek en Rui­j­grok v.o.f. Eek first devel­oped an inter­est in old mate­ri­als after restor­ing a cup­board for his sis­ter; he thought the old wood looked nicer than the new. He has built his busi­ness around old mate­ri­als, sav­ing these dis­carded pieces of wood and work­ing out­side of the cir­cuit of mass pro­duc­tion. His work is sold in numer­ous gal­leries world­wide. He has exhib­ited at such venues as the Museum of Mod­ern Art, New York; the Milan Fur­ni­ture Fair, Italy; and Cïbone, Tokyo.

Alu­minium collection

The eletron­ics giant Philips is based in Eind­hoven. One day Piet Hein Eek found a num­ber of metal-framed doors dis­carded at Philips dump. The doors were orig­i­nally part of a tech­ni­cal box. This Alu­minium Cup­board came out as a log­i­cal result of the size, char­ac­ter and for­mer use of the win­dows. The cup­boards became pop­u­lar, so they began repro­duc­ing the orig­i­nal Philips doors. Later on, they redesigned them to be like orig­i­nal ones thereby per­fect­ing the cup­boards. The Alu­minium Chair was inspired by a visit to a com­pany that man­u­fac­tured sheet steel prod­ucts using CNC machines. Eek per­ceived a cer­tain beauty in the neg­a­tive forms that emerged from the metal after the machine had fin­ished punch­ing out the holes. He had no expe­ri­ence work­ing with metal in this way but, inspired by the process, began design­ing pieces together with the fac­tory. This chair was later used for a café inte­rior project for the Museum of Mod­ern Art in New York.

Prices on demand.
Con­tact: Mal­her and Hérold