29 January 2016

Good designers always work on the borderline between industrial product and experimental project, without perverting the nature of their research or refusing to put themselves to the test of the market. The Dutch designers Stefan Scholten and Carole Baijings, trained at the legendary Design Academy in Eindhoven—a center of excellence in education that has turned out talents like Hella Jongerius, Tord Boontje, Marcel Wanders and Gijs Bakker, the founder of Droog—are well aware of this. The fifteen years of synergy between the pair of them are celebrated in the volume Reproducing Scholten & Baijings, which includes a fine introductory text by the scholar Louise Schouwenberg that traces the course of their professional development: from the comparison between mass production and handicrafts to their ideas on the future of design. The weightiest part of the monograph is the one devoted to a selection of seven projects, all documented by a great variety of drawings, sketches, prototypes and color samples from their personal archives. The graphic concept of the book has been shaped by Joost Grootens in such a way as to enter into symbiosis with the couple’s style: from the perforated dust jacket, which recalls their work for Mini, to the inserts of special paper between the chapters, each with a texture, weight and graphics of its own. The final anthological pages bring this long and magnificent journey through the world of Scholten & Baijings to a close. Published by Phaidon.