GRP meets porcelain

The 'Professorship Project' (Projekt Professur) is the name of the programme at the Karlsruhe College of Design under which well-known designers are invited to become visiting professors at the college and which, after three appointments so far, has proved highly successful. Last year Stefan Diez from Munich held the one-year professorship, after his predecessors James Irvine from Milan and Jurgen Bey from Rotterdam had previously been tempted to spend a year by the Upper Rhine.

Stefan Diez brought two producers on board and placed the main focus on industrial feasibility, dialogue between students and manufacturers and the resulting complexity of student design.
He involved two very different groups: the porcelain producers Thomas, a part of the Rosenthal group, for which Diez was already working himself, and the Swiss firm of Faserplast, which produces a range of products from fibre-glass reinforced plastics. For some years now Faserplast has, under the art direction of the Zürich designer Jörg Boner, been working on a range of furniture and lamps which is sold under the 'nanoo' label.
The result of the close cooperation between college, students and manufacturers was a series of outstanding prototypes which were presented to the general public for the first time at this year's imm cologne.

'Nido' by Eva Marguerre is a series of filigree stools which are given their delicate structure by strands of fibre glass which are interwoven, wrapped around and then permeated in polyester resin.