When I came upon the booth for Al-Hamad Design, it was immediately obvious to me that there was something very interesting going on there. As I paused to take mental pictures before moving on, I noticed a nice-looking boxy wooden chair with soft, creamy leather upholstery. The person at the booth, who I later learned was the designer himself, Nanu Al-Hamad, lowered the back of the chair. It became a small table. Then he flipped a switch to turn on a light inside the box. It was also a light fixture.
This kind of exploration with different functionality and technology has the potential for Al-Hamad and designers like him to stumble onto just the right and unprecedented combination of elements that could literally give birth to an entirely new kind of design object altogether. I find this incredibly exciting. It's tilling the garden of revolution.
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| Q8 |
The image there is Q8, a mirror occupying roughly a three-foot square (a square meter) with the islands off Kuwait's east coast attached to the wall separately. Al-Hamad said he's always loved the the shape of the country where he was born and uses this as his bathroom mirror.
At some point during our conversation, I told Al-Hamad that from what I could tell, most of his work has a combination of three things. 1) A number of different functions in a single design object, 2) an unexpected sort of interactivity, and 3) something transcendent that begs the user to activate his or her imagination. He seemed to think that was a nice way of summarizing. Here I'll also add that they all use interesting or luxurious materials and often consciously call attention to their materiality.
Little Oyster sufficiently covers the first element. I think the piece that most simply and literally demonstrates the second and third is his Bright Idea arm chair.
It is a chair and at the same time, like much of Al-Hamad's work, a piece of Conceptual Art, as well. It's designed to encourage inspiration. You sit comfortably on its buttery Moore & Gilles leather upholstery to contemplate, and when the inspiration comes, a leather-upholstered button in the arm rest turns on a light bulb above your head. Eureka! Not content with a one-trick pony, Al-Hamad gives the piece an added bit of aesthetic distinction by providing the beautiful but relatively conventional walnut armchair with interestingly sculpted legs. The chair appears to be growing out of the floor. Furthermore, the legs pull the piece down into the floor surface far more than balls and claws might have, creating a wonderful tension with the light bulb and the abstract ideas it represents, which want to ascend up into the stratosphere.
Taking advantage of more advanced materials are two pieces of outdoor furniture, Cradle and Gibbous. Both pieces are made from a durable, waterproof, glow-in-the-dark fabric which charges in the sunlight during the day and then gives off light throughout the night. That the pieces are also light sources is not a shocker, of course. Al-Hamad loves incorporating the element of light into his work. With Cradle, it's the fact that the sort of hammock lounge is carried on rockers at the top and bottom that begs you to use your imagination. The piece encourages you to tap into some early, infantile memories of being in a cradle and to be soothed by the comfort of the rocking motion that accompanies it.
Gibbous is an ornamental object, an arm chair, an ottoman, and a back-rest all at once, and was regarded highly enough to earn an A'Design Award in 2012.
Somewhat similar in execution, though completely different in form is a custom bar Al-Hamad designed called Vertex. In spirit, it's an object of art, a large, dark, monolithic oak box with a glowing, jagged-edged acrylic cloud floating above it--simple, refined, and distinctive.
Al-Hamad has also delved fully into the world of fine art. While visiting his birth country, he visited a small island in the Persian Gulf called Failaka. Failaka Island retains some fame from Alexander the Great, who encountered it in his campaign from Greece to northern India and left some markers of Greek culture behind. It was one of the longest continuously occupied regions of Kuwait and supposedly has glorious seasonal patterns and local flora. In 1990, Iraq invaded the island, exhiling almost all its residents to mainland Kuwait. The Iraqi military used it as a base and for target practice. Sadly, this and the resulting violent expulsion of the Iraqi army by allied forces pretty much obliterated the island.
The result is a lot of ruins of what had been relatively beautiful houses, some fairly palatial. It was strange, he told me, to find houses that were essentially a bombed-out empty shell but with an oddly intact bathroom, for instance. He also said the island has become something of a tourist destination, no doubt due to its scenic beauty, but that the main resort hotel is mildly tacky. Most interesting, he found, was the graffiti. Teenagers have for some odd reason chosen this unique island as a backdrop for messages of love and the search for it. Most of it, he indicated, is of the "Carmen ♥ Faisal" variety, but the kids will also write their email addresses or similar, and quite amusingly, things from popular culture, like "Justin Bieber." Very wisely, he photographed a good number of the more interesting tags.
He had only ever intended this to be a one-of-a-kind work of art. However, a certain businessman saw the piece and wanted one for his office. The compromise Al-Hamad made was to instead create for this client a giant Blackberry Curve 9300. This way, he didn't feel as if he were repeating himself verbatim. Moral of the story, you're unlikely to be able to talk him into making one of these for your office unless it's an entirely different device or you a$k him very, very ni$ely. Evidently, and not surprisingly, everyone who enters that client's office and sees the giant Blackberry falls in love with it.
Chandelier is also more a work of Conceptual Art than it is a piece of furniture, although Al-Hamad clearly loves to flirt with those distinctions. I say that not because it isn't a perfectly functional chair or a perfectly functional light fixture. Rather, its installation would require relatively remarkable preparations, and to experience it as its design was intended would require a bit more space than one would expect to find in a typical building interior. The legend goes that he saw a cartoon of a person swinging from a chandelier and wanted to create a more practical way to do that. So he created a low-hanging chandelier with an enormous throne sitting on top of it. The chair rises about six feet (2m), and is upholstered, impressively, in a single piece of leather with no seams.
He had considered the possibility of using camel hide to give this piece an added bit of Kuwaiti flavor, but this proved to be impossible. In talking to a dealer, he discovered that the skinning process involves first cutting off the camel's hump. So the resulting pieces of leather will decidedly have a hole in the middle, making camel hide unsuitable for applications requiring larger sheets of it.
The piece I'd like to end with is the Embarakiya floor lamp. I end here not because it's my favorite. In fact, the thought of arriving home late at night to a dark apartment and having a human figure looming in the corner of my living room makes me shudder a little (I'll happily recommend it for non-residential applications). Nonetheless, I think it incorporates everything that makes Al-Hamad's work so interesting, and at the same time ends up being somewhat provocative.
The female figures don't have speakers--I'll leave it for my Feminist readers to psychoanalyze that--but their garments, the abaya and hijab (or nikab) are more ornamental with, in this case, truly exquisite embroidered gold trim. The headdress fabric was thin enough to warrant a second layer, and as a result, the weave of the two layers of textile overlaps to create interesting patterns in the filtered light.
The interactivity and the transcendent are locked together here. In order to turn on the light in the figure's head, you shake its hand, which has a touch-sensor in it. It seemed to me the narrative being played out here for an American audience was quite striking; to call forth light from the head of a figure in traditional Arabian dress, you must perform a friendly, welcoming gesture with it. I first asked Al-Hamad if it were a political statement he was making. He laughed and said, "no, no, not at all." In fact, in talking to him, I quickly realized he's mostly just having fun creating the pieces that he does. My reading was all wrong, but I think that's partially the point here.
He said that the response from audiences in Kuwait was anything but disturbed. In fact, most people who saw it there simply found it amusing and clever. Responses at the ICFF were quite different. Some people actually voiced concerns about the piece, questioning if those who came across this might have a problem with it. That seemed sadly xenophobic to me at best, and at worst, kind of downright racist. This was why I asked not that question, but the one I did, which was about the differences between the responses from Kuwaiti audiences and the white, European-American ones at the show.
Whether intentional or not, it's incredibly rare to find a work of mere furniture design that can elicit such wildly different emotions from different people. I think the lesson to be learned from this work is that it's those very differences that we must set aside--along with the kind of unnecessarily political readings to which I admittedly fell victim--so we can just have fun and enjoy being a part of a truly global design community.
Much thanks to Nanu Al-Hamad. I'll be eager to see what brilliant directions he takes us next.
All images courtesy Al-Hamad Design. All text ©2012, Ryan Witte.
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