Alex­an­der Loter­sz­tain at UFL

Two days ago, UFL in Auck­land brought across three inter­na­tional guest speak­ers: Argentina-born designer Alex­an­der Loter­sz­tain, from Derlot, was one. He shared his thoughts on, amongst other things, sus­tain­ab­il­ity, ‘mono-materiality and why design­ers have a respons­ib­il­ity to help poorer countries.

Stump, a recycled poly­ethyl­ene stool designed with min­imum parts for cost effect­ive and effi­cient manufacture.

For starters, Loter­sz­tain ticks the first box to which all ser­i­ous design­ers should aspire – like Kon­stantin Grcic, but per­haps not quite to the same extent, he has a name to make an English-speaking mono­glot tremble. From Argen­tina ori­gin­ally, Loter­sz­tain moved incre­ment­ally up the alpha­bet to Aus­tralia, where he stud­ied indus­trial design in Aus­tralia, before head­ing fur­ther afield for design jobs in Japan, Milan and Bar­celona. From there it was back to Aus­tralia, where he has since star­ted up Derlot.

Derlot, says the designer, pro­duces a bespoke range of fur­niture. “We are a small boutique stu­dio – there’s only about three of us in the stu­dio, some times a few more, some­times a few less depend­ing on the pro­jects that we tackle. For our fur­niture and light­ing we have a very strong philo­sophy – we want to try and man­u­fac­ture everything in Aus­tralia, keep­ing it local. Another aspect of the range is that we want to show the product for hat it is, and people to under­stand the product for what it is.”

Loter­sz­tain is a pro­ponent of what he calls “mono-materiality”, a design ethos that sees him look to intro­duce the most min­imum of mater­ial palettes into his designs.

“When we con­sider design we try to use only the min­imal num­ber of mater­i­als, if pos­sible only one mater­ial. Because that, I guess, from my point of view, is the easi­est way to be sus­tain­able – using com­mon sense. If you have one mater­ial, that’s one man­u­fac­turer one energy out­put, there’s no ship­ping in between man­u­fac­tur­ers of com­pon­entry, there’s no dis­as­sembly at the end of the lifespan of the product.”

Part of Lerod’s ver­sat­il­ity, says the designer, is the abil­ity to re-powdercoat it and thus meet chan­ging aes­thetic requirements.

An example of this approach can be seen in his Plant­a­tion and Lerod fur­niture. The story behind the Lerod design, as Loter­sz­tain recounts it, is a fas­cin­at­ing example of the man­u­fac­tur­ing industry evolving laterally.

“In Aus­tralia, there’s a lot of dif­fi­culty in inspir­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers. We don’t have the tra­di­tion of Scand­inavian coun­tries, or Italy, in terms of approach­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers with our designs. This man­u­fac­turer was doing shop­ping trol­leys – that was their main busi­ness, their bread and but­ter – and fridge shelving; that was about it. I approached them with the idea and ini­tially they said, ‘no we can’t help you’. Two months later they lost their account with Coles, one of the major super­mar­kets in Aus­tralia, and they picked up the phone and said, ‘oh maybe we’ll look into those chairs for you’.

The range of chairs and stools is almost entirely com­prised of powder­coated steel. The bars of the seat are ori­ent­ated front-to-back for com­fort, and to aid the ease of slid­ing on and off. It’s the powder­coat­ing, how­ever, says the designer, which is “the best thing about it”. Lerod chairs and stools can be re-powdercoated over-and-over again, which makes it immune, to a degree, to the capri­cious­ness of faddism.

Plant­a­tion is another range the designer has pro­duced with an eye towards waste elim­in­a­tion. Loter­sz­tain says he has always been fas­cin­ated with work­ing in tim­ber. “It’s a beau­ti­ful mater­ial; we’ve been using tim­ber since the begin­ning of time. It’s some­thing we are very famil­iar with … it’s almost in our DNA. But I wanted to make it in a sus­tain­able way, I didn’t want to use hard­woods, I wanted to cre­ate a range of fur­niture made out of plant­a­tion ply­wood. This whole range is about marine-grade ply­wood. And the whole design was about try­ing to find the most effect­ive pos­sible way of man­u­fac­tur­ing the chairs.”

Plant­a­tion, man­u­fac­tured from plant­a­tion ply­wood. Four chairs can be cut from a single sheet of 25mm plywood

As a res­ult of his invest­ig­a­tions, the designer devised a sys­tem whereby he can make about four chairs from a single sheet of 25mm ply­wood. The waste mater­ial, about 7 per cent, is made into egg cups which were then given away – “ a present” – for the buy­ers of the chairs.

“The idea behind this was to inspire people to think out­side the square. We’re say­ing ok, you’re buy­ing our chair, that’s fine, you get two eggcups as a present – but it’s to cre­ate aware­ness that we are being respons­ible about the way we think about what we go about.”

The designer has a num­ber of other products under his belt. There’s Twig, a con­crete out­door fur­niture sys­tem, which he says has proven very pop­u­lar in Spain. He has also designed a plastic ver­sion of Twig, to exactly the same dimen­sions, which weighs 70kg, versus the con­crete version’s 2000kg. “It’s only 70kg, but there’s a few extra options. It’s water fil­lable, so if you want to have it in areas where there’s a pos­sib­il­ity that someone might walk out with it, which would be quite dif­fi­cult, we can fill it up with water and bring it up to about 500 to 700 kg. There’s options of fire-retardancy, options of UV sta­bil­ity, options of LED lights, and an upholstered ver­sion as well.”

Twig, con­crete form.

Twig, plastic form with interior lighting.

Another new sys­tem man­u­fac­tured from the same recycled poly­ethyl­ene mater­ial is Stump. “There are plenty of stools out there […] the dif­fer­ence that we wanted to try and cre­ate was not really on the shape … but it was also about explor­ing the man­u­fac­tur­ing pro­cess. Here we have one par­ti­tion line and two heights of stools, which allows us to pro­duce up to three sizes of stools with only two tools. That was mainly an idea of try­ing to be as cost-effective in the man­u­fac­tur­ing side to provide a product that is still com­ing down from Aus­tralia and being cost effect­ive and competitive.”

Stump, a range of mod­els with model.

Stump, with cof­fee table variant.

To fur­ther flex­ib­il­ity and effi­ciency, the higher stool was designed with cof­fee table dimen­sions in mind. As a final note, the designer has also com­pleted some work with In Africa, vis­it­ing Sub Saha­ran Africa to assist with the devel­op­ment of com­mer­cial aven­ues for hand­craf­ted fur­niture pieces.

In Africa – “fus­ing con­tem­por­ary design with tra­di­tional craft skills and under­stand­ing of cul­tural diversity to ensure sus­tain­ab­il­ity and unique­ness through global mar­ket appeal”.

“This is where design should be head­ing,” he says. “I mean, we have beau­ti­ful fur­niture here, and I’m sure we are mak­ing a lot of people happy, but at the end of the day, 90 per cent of the world is prob­ably in this situ­ation [liv­ing below the poverty line].

“As design­ers we have a respons­ib­il­ity of try­ing to tackle these issues as well. So, I began work­ing with a com­pany called In Africa. It’s an organ­isa­tion that works at grass roots level in South­ern Africa dir­ectly with the com­munit­ies rather than the governments.

“This pro­ject is about col­lab­or­at­ing with these com­munit­ies, under­stand­ing their skills, their craft – I felt very priv­ileged to do so, as some of these com­munit­ies have tra­di­tions that go back 3000 years. Being able to share this exper­i­ence and bring in my point of view and doing some­thing that would be more com­mer­cially reach­able for them was a great res­ult. It’s almost instant. You go there and you see new roofs on the houses, and the chil­dren health­ier. Its also beau­ti­ful work.”

–Michael Bar­rett