A Mind at Play-Philippe Starck's Designs in Metal

摘要

The fiftieth anniversary of Philippe Starck's career as a designer is fast approaching, and the one-time wunderkind has now become an eminence grise. Born in 1949. Starck belongs to what the French call the "generation of '68," the Baby Boomers who questioned everything around them. By that watershed year, he had already dropped out of the prestigious Paris design academy Ecole Nissim de Camondo to launch a company to manufacture inflatable furniture. It was a pitch-perfect wink of irony in an earnest world, the debut gesture of the man who would become perhaps the best-known functional designer of his time, and later a leading critic of celebrity design. That his first company failed is almost beside the point; Starck was soon commissioned to create inflatables for Quasar Khanh, the seminal pop designer from Vietnam.