The Shapeshifter: Alain Berteau

Alain Berteau is on a mission.

The mild-mannered, bespectacled Brussels native may come across as one of the most cordial designers you’ll ever meet in the industry, but he takes no prisoners when it comes to his profession. You see, he’s a design malcontent. Never happy with the status quo of things. For him and his team at Alain Berteau Designworks – whether developing paradigm-shifting projects for his own, super-functional brand Objekten Systems or working on commissions for the likes of Bulo and TossB – are not in business to deliver the same old, same old. For Berteau, design typologies are there to be challenged.

“We work hard questioning existing typologies for ourselves and for clients,” explains Berteau. “We can’t help it. Shaping a model to make it ‘good-looking’, ‘ trendy’ or ‘stylish’ is nice, but it’s by far the easiest and least interesting part of the process. For us, it’s not enough.” Not that the Belgian is in the business of pushing the boundaries just for the sake of it. It’s about responding to a real need on the part of users, and a real need on the part of society.

No one would argue with the desire to make products more useable and more affordable, certainly not Berteau. But it’s also about rethinking product types to make them easier and less resource-demanding to produce. “We try to match or even anticipate future behaviours and needs,” says the self-confessed obsessive, “by developing objects that look obvious and familiar, but which are actually innovative. At the same time, cheaper, faster and more eco-friendly.”

This doesn’t always mean using the latest technologies (“Why reinvent a comfortable chair shell if you already have thousands of existing plywood moulds?”), but it can. Take Objekten Systems’ deployment of 3D-knitting for their latest FABRIC collection of a chair and tables. Here, state-of-the-art 3D-knitting machines are used to create a recyclable polyester skin, which is held in tension on a highly graphic, tubular-steel frame. The result is a super-legible, timeless series of objects, where high-tech meets lo-fi.

Berteau and his colleagues have been busy. This year’s Salone del Mobile sees the launch of two new projects with typological twists. The first is the revisiting of their successful TAB chair for Bulo, the premium Belgian office-furniture brand. Launched over a decade ago, TAB – with its distinctive ‘folded’ profile and superlative ergonomics – has been expanded into a modular, solutions-oriented system for an array of contract settings. Taking the basic shell of the original TAB chair, the Brussels team have cleverly elaborated a range of flexible seating configurations, including beams and sectional-sofa systems.

For innovative lighting manufacturer TossB, meanwhile, Berteau and his team have taken the standard lamp typology, maintaining its familiar silhouette, and compressed it in almost two dimensions. Called the THIN lamp collection (the clue is in the name), the innovative layered design permits, beyond its luminary and aesthetic functions, the optimal cooling of its LED components, thereby extending their life. Launched as a suspension lamp, with table and wall variants to follow, THIN features an internal, flat steel plate to maximise illumination, with decorative side panels in a number of finishes including wood. Like TAB, the lamp is at home at home, as it were, and in contract environments.

A new club version of the TAB chair, plus a supremely elegant lounger version, join the fold, too. (No pun intended.) Of course, in true Berteau style, the shells of both are made available as basic modules for a range of sectional-seating compositions.

It’s all systems go, so to speak, at a special event in Brussels at the end of April, too, as Objekten Systems expands further its collection of intelligent products with the richly upholstered, easily configurable KEYPAD seating system and the pared-down, space-defining KEYBOARD desk and storage system. The former can be transformed by a simple movement from bench to daybed, sofa or armchair. The desk/storage, meanwhile, is completely modular, requires absolutely no tools for assembly, and has an additional acoustic-management benefit with its friendly fabric side panels. Sound out.

Berteau may be motivated by a dissatisfaction with the status quo of our material world, but shifting paradigms is for him ultimately about spreading a bit of sustainable happiness – and taking a big slice of it for himself. “We’re in it for the the joy of creating simple stuff, meaningful long-sellers that really stay the course on the market,” he says. This is one Belgian who cuts through the waffle.

© Architonic