The Blocks and Grid are the first of the upholstery
textile products to come out of a new collaboration between Scholten &
Baijings and the Maharam Design Studio.
Founded in Amsterdam in 2000 by Stefan Scholten and Carole
Baijings, Scholten & Baijings, Studio for Design is known for their range
of interior products characterised by minimal forms, and enhanced by simple
geometric patterning and an acute sense of colour.
Scholten & Baijings explored modern approaches to
colour blocking in response to Maharam’s open brief for a new upholstery
textile design. They decided to develop two large-scale compositions based on
the ten yards typically required to upholster a sofa, resulting in the Blocks
and Grid, both of which have massive 27.5’ repeats.
Throughout the development process, Scholten &
Baijings assessed the efficacy of their designs on numerous scale models.
Stefan Scholten explained that it was challenging because they had to make sure
a nine-metre piece of fabric that showed the whole repeat had to be just as
interesting as a single metre of fabric. The Blocks and Grid patterns were designed
to combine seamlessly, enabling the creation of a new visual effect with each
application.
While Blocks features subtle colours lightly juxtaposed or
overlapped to create effects of depth and transparency, Grid explores colour
densities built up by parallel and perpendicular lines.
Blocks and Grid debuted in 2013 at London’s Victoria
& Albert Museum as part of ‘The Dinner Party’ and at the Art Institute of
Chicago’s exhibition, ‘3 in 1: Contemporary Explorations in Architecture and Design’,
and will feature in an installation of Scholten & Baijings’s work this
summer at the Villa Noailles in Hyères, France. Both textiles have been
accepted into the permanent collection of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design
Museum.
Scholten & Baijings will also be presenting a third
textile, Tones at NeoCon 2014. To be introduced by Maharam in Spring 2015, Tones
continues Scholten & Baijings’s exploration of colour at a reduced scale, combining
two distinct hues in different shades and tints, rendered by various weave
structures as panes of chromatic gradation.
Maharam offers a comprehensive collection of textiles
for commercial and residential interiors.
