The competition was held jointly by the Perm Design Development Center and the designet.ru portal. The jury consisted of six Russian designers, one Pole, chairman of the Perm Association of Furniture Manufacturers, and Ross Lovegrove as the "star". The prize fund of 400 thousand prize rubles was divided between the owners of the first three places in each of three thematic nominations: 60, 40 and 20 thousand, respectively. The jury also awarded seven honorable mentions, recognizing a total of thirty of the one hundred and twelve designers who entered the competition.
Looking at the list of winners, fully presented on the organizer's website designet.ru, it is easy to understand that the judges, as they should, tried to choose the most non-standard ideas from the proposed ideas. Thus, in the category "Furniture for the Urban Environment" the best was recognized a bench on two pointed legs called ATIS, designed, according to the idea of its author Mikhail Belyaev, to be stuck into the ground like a beach umbrella. These benches can be placed on slopes where seating is usually not available. In order to prevent overweight riders from pushing these benches too deep into the ground, the author has provided special "tails" - fixators. According to one of the jury members, Polish-Swiss designer Oskar Zyt, these romantic benches bring people closer to nature.
Most of the designers who worked in the Furniture for Educational Institutions nomination focused on school and kindergarten desks that fold into compact piles. And Vladislav Zhukovets, the author of charming knee-legged stools, won. The legs of his stools are neatly plastic, while the seat is made of a polished cut of a tree trunk, on which the annual circles are clearly visible. Children can use these rings to calculate the “age” of their wood-encrusted seats. The star of the jury, Briton Ross Lovegrove, predicted a brilliant commercial success for these stools.
Chairs, sofa and coffee tables of Maxim Maximov, recognized as the best example of "furniture for public institutions", the head of the jury Vadim Kibardin called the best project of the competition. They are folded like origami from bent metal sheets and filled with large, soft seating cushions.
Other projects marked by the jury demonstrate, on the one hand, the vividness of the author's fantasy, and on the other, a certain hackneyedness of the paths that this fantasy follows in its development. Traditionally, a lot of design effort has been devoted to finding ways to optimally stack furniture - and arrange it in space. In this area, again, as always, the bee theme of the honeycomb is in the lead: in the "honeycomb" order of joining, the designers arrange both office tables and highchairs and city benches. The second favorite theme of furniture makers is bright colors; the third is ecology: wood and bright green surfaces are equally responsible for it. And that, and another, and the third, you see, is boring. Most of the things noted by the jury correspond to the "world level" (this is how Vadim Kibardin comments on his favorite works) - however, no breakthrough is observed.
However, the absence of extreme innovation can also be understood: all the projects marked by the jury, in addition to the obvious focus on the same "world level", have one quality in common - there are no conceptual hooliganism and extreme artistic searches among them. All these are prêt à porter things aimed at being put into production - the organizers promise implementation to at least the winning projects. However, the official press release of the competition does not say anything of the kind.
Yu. T.
