"Jens Praet studio has an intensive approach towards
traditional handcrafting in combination with avant-garde techniques."






"The design studio has transformed unuseful documents and leftover magazines into valuable and useful objects. To this end are being mixed the confetti from shredded paper and resin into a mould and letting it harden to become rigid objects. The paper-resin composite boasts a firmness similar to wood and has a unique appearance. Paper waste returns to our living or working area as functional furniture, bringing to mind just what little thought we give to general use of paper."





Industry opens up shop in Los Angeles at the Pacific Design Center this upcoming week with Jens Praet, an Italian designer using an inventive + sculptural approach to furniture design. Looking forward to the Industry opening and interacting with these works in person. LA continues to flourish in design as more galleries approach furniture / architecture / interiors. Lots of events at PDC this week, Christian Liagre is in town(!), an event with Azadeh Design Studio celebrating her new works, plus tons more.



Jens Praet is a design studio based in Panzano in Chianti, a small town near Firenze in Italy, run by belgian designer Jens Praet. Jens studied Industrial Design in Firenze and attended the Master classes at the renowned Design Academy in Eindhoven under Droog Design’s co-founder Gijs Bakker. Studio Jens Praet works from a conceptual angle on topics of contemporary culture, out of own initiative and on assignment. The studio has an intensive approach towards traditional handcrafting in combination with avant-garde techniques. Jens has a strong passion for everyday objects, honest materials, finding inspiration in unexpected details and daily issues which often become the starting point in developing a new concept. (text from here)


INDUSTRY 21st Century Design Gallery Pacific Design Center
Blue Building Suite B 270 8687 Melrose Avenue, West Hollywood, CA




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R U I N S 1992....
Ettore Sottsass

"Now however I realize missionaries of every kind have done so much with their gorgeous designs that I feel as if I had wandered deeper and deeper into an immense desert of ruins and everything I do, whatever project comes into my mind, seems to turn immediately into a ruin. "















R U I N S

"I called this exhibition “Ruins” because at the moment more than ever the word “Ruins” seems to explain just how I feel. At one time I used to call some of my designs or booklets “Esercizi Formali”, meaning I didn’t feel “committed”, at least not in the way classic intellectuals do. So I did things where any commitment there might be would be remote and indirect.

I never seriously thought that all-embracing projects could exist to save the world and mankind, and still less have I been able to design a personal system of my own. I have never felt like a missionary or ever thought it was my duty to save souls, or nations, or still less the societies on this planet.

Now however I realize missionaries of every kind have done so much with their gorgeous designs that I feel as if I had wandered deeper and deeper into an immense desert of ruins and everything I do, whatever project comes into my mind, seems to turn immediately into a ruin. It seems to become a solitary presence whose reasons I myself understand less and less, whose connections with the rest are more and more of a mystery to me.

Everything I do becomes a steadily more random, mysterious presence, just as ruins in a desert are mysterious – populated by remains of ancient by now incomprehensible geologies by remains of ancient evaporated torrential rains, by remains of unknown, vanished vegetations.

Perhaps there nothing else for me to do but walk among ruins and maybe when I design I have no other destiny but to produce ruins, I mean designs dropped without explanation into the midst of millions of other designs the logic and binders and connections of which will never ever be known to me. "

Ettore Sottsass, 1992

















Ettore Sottsass
(14 September 1917 – 31 December 2007)





go to Design Gallery Milano for more images and text..
here....










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