Maarten Baas is this year’s Design Miami/ Designer of the Year award recipient. The Dutch designer first received attention as he was just leaving design school for his Smoke series. For that body of work, he burned design classics like Ettore Sottsass’s 1981 Carlton room divider and Gerrit T. Rietveld’s 1934 Zig Zag chair. Whitewall spoke with Baas at the HSBC lounge inside the fair.
WHITEWALL: Congratulations on the award for Designer of the Year. Tell me about the exhibition here of your work and the commissioned piece [in the photo above].
MAARTEN BAAS: I just wanted to make a piece that was kind of…it’s a very difficult one to talk about. I just started and we were experimenting with it in the studio and, yeah, I just had this idea.
WW: Are the piece of metal welded together? It looks similar to your recent project for Adam Lindemann. Is it a similar technique?
MB: Yeah. Its not totally the same, those two came after each other.
WW: And then for the exhibition space, how did you decide what you wanted to present? Why did you decide to bring these specific objects?
MB: I wanted to show all my work that I’ve done so far. Compared to the other Designers of the Year, they had already made so many things before they received the award. I have been around only for 6 or 7 years now so I wanted to kind of introduce myself. I'm sure that most of the people know Smoke or Clay, but the whole range of works has to be shown, and I really wanted to show the whole complexity of my things. All my work is a little bit of everything, I dont follow a certain line. I jump from one to another and together they may have something in common but at the same time they are also very diverse.
WW: The commonality is that you made them.
MB: My collection of works is an extension of my personality. If they ask me to present myself, then it needs to have all elements in it I think.
WW: What do you think of that attention you’ve received for achieving such an award at a young age?
MB: I just do what I do. I never felt problems being young, I just go full on and I never felt a kind of ceiling through which I couldn’t go because of my age. In fact, there’s a lot of advantages to being young. For example, I think for Smoke it kind of makes sense that I didn’t have a history yet. I think Smoke wouldn’t have had as big of a success if someone else like Philippe Starck had come up with it. It kind of has an element of a young guy, changing the world. I thin that’s a significant part of Smoke’s success.
