Erwan Bouroullec

There are people who think through what they touch. Who read the world through skin, through eyes, through breath. Erwan Bouroullec is one of them. He designs, but he also listens. He observes. “Everything around me can be a small piece of information,” he says, and you understand that his work doesn’t begin in the studio, but in the moment he opens his eyes. “I’m not a cultivated person,” he says. “I don’t read books, I don’t build concepts. But what surrounds me speaks to me. I try to receive it without organising it too much.”

Erwan Bouroullec doesn’t design objects. He designs relationships between forms, between people, between materials, sometimes between thoughts and silences. Perhaps that’s why his pieces speak without shouting: because behind each one lies a human gesture, a question still waiting for an answer.

For Erwan, design is a way of understanding how we behave in relation to what we make. There’s no hierarchy between the object and life itself; both are part of the same daily experiment. “We know less and less how to behave as humans with the products and design around us,” he says, with a mix of sadness and clarity. Perhaps that’s why he insists on simplicity: “Try to do something easy to read, easy to understand.” His words sound like a manifesto. He is a thinker who expresses himself through materials, through colour, through the gesture of assembling. He speaks of design as a way of being in the world, of recognising what is essential amidst complexity.

I dare to say Mynt gathers all these ideas Erwan offers so lightly, as if they were gifts without an abstract weight. The chair is Bouroullec’s latest creation for Vitra, the reason for his visit to Barcelona Design Week. As he explains, he never designs a table for an office, but simply a table to be used as needed. The same happens with this chair, and with any other he might design. It must feel comfortable, whether for work or for life (if those two things can truly be separated).

There’s something instinctive in his gaze. “I like to see the world as a jungle,” he says. In the jungle, everything is information: smell, texture, sound. Nothing is hierarchical. He remembers being in Thailand, walking through dense vegetation. “Don’t touch anything, don’t stop, don’t wash,” his guide warned him. “You never know what might happen.” That lesson has stayed with him: to observe without intervening, to move carefully, to understand that design is also a form of respect; a way of staying curious, almost childlike, in front of the world.

“Children don’t know the rules; that’s why they’re so efficient,” he says. When Erwan speaks about nature, he does so with disarming precision. He doesn’t idealise the forest or the field. He prefers imperfect places where the natural and the artificial overlap. “The nature I love has the overlay of synthetic shapes and colours on top of it.” He recalls scenes from his childhood: a muddy field, a horse, a piece of woodland, a green and yellow tractor. Machines become patches of colour in the landscape, geometries coexisting with soil and grass. Farm buildings, seen from afar, resemble models (white, dark green, orange) and among them, the movement of people, of labour, of time.