Chicago Interview with Ross Lovegrove

With white flowing hair and distinguishably dressed in his signature white leather overcoat, Ross Lovegrove is an elegant man. As one who is charming and witty in conversation, he has much to say. Recently during Neocon, Design-engine.com staff had the pleasure of showing Ross around Chicago. Showing him a good time in Chicago would mean he would talk it up in London. We met Ross at the Lightology opening and later accompanied him to Sonotheque, the newest nightclub in Chicago. During one of our nights out we recorded part of our conversation.

Interview by Design-engine.com correspondent Peter Meyer.

"What new Projects do you have going on at the moment?"

"New projects at the moment? Some fun stuff at the moment. I'm doing a Villa for a Sheikh in Qatar, i’ve got to do this erotic Arab bedroom for which I'm really enjoying the research! I’m doing a hairdressing salon, one in Milan and another in Moscow. I’m doing a tour at the moment and in a month have been to Tokyo, Milan and twice to Moscow. I’m trying to teach the new order of organic for the whole world. I’m trying to sell the whole concept of beautiful actual form to people in different countries and it seems to be working."

"What was your inspiration for the Go-Chair?"

“Body form, sensuality, anatomical base, high technology, want to make things which can only exist today. I don’t want to make anything which remotely could have been made yesterday; it’s about absolutely being in clue with what goes on now. To do that, i’ve married what I call beauty and logic. If you meet a woman and she’s beautiful, but there is nothing logical there, it’s not sustainable and vice versa. So basically I’m looking for that wonderful marriage between the two.”

“The thing is, in this chunky world of design it's very easy to impress people, especially if you get famous, but it’s not easy to impress yourself if you have high standards. What I've been trying to do are things that have what I call 'irrefutable evidence', so that the way they are produced means they always have a story which is extremely emotional and humanist. So, that could be anything from an organic shaped wood or bottle to a building; perhaps in Tokyo, where form is related very much to man and you create spaces that people feel primordial in because we’re not that old as a species; we respond well to form. There’s not a straight line on the human body so in a way what I do is very legitimate; it’s touching people’s souls. So I want to do really funky things, but at the same time I want to save the planet, I want to do eco-cars with solar panels on the roof. I want to do all that stuff and show young people that being funky being published and being meteoroid is all there to sell a much more profound message to people.

It sounds like you’ve been all over the world. "Have you ever pulled things from other cultures?"

I can give you a nice example of that. About three weeks ago I was in Moscow and I worked with the Kremlin and the great thing is working at a certain level you get this V.I.P. treatment. They open The Kremlin for you; it’s amazing, it’s outrageous! And in there they have all these amazing pieces of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, they have all the wardrobes, she changed her dress everyday, brand new dress for every day of her life and nobody knows this. And in this one room there were all these incredible gilded carriages and literally three days later I was in Grants in Austria with Chris Bangle, head of design with BMW, Peter Shire head of design Volkswagen Audi, Burack Gurack head of design with Mercedes and Keith Rider head of design with Peugeot Citreon and I was presenting the design awards in Austria with these guys. And actually they nearly pushed me off-stage because of course when everyone gets the introduction they say: well Chris Bangle did the five series there; and then they said Lovegrove, he designs everything and they went on for about half an hour and they started complaining and wanted to throw me off-stage. The point that I’m trying to make is that the girl who won first place did a car that went slow and looked like one of those horse drawn carriages from 150 years ago and only three days before I’d been in the Kremlin. Looking at them and that’s often what happens in life.

One of the primary things Design-engine wants to do is to promote those people that turn concepts into form and develop them. You’d like to see those designers get some recognition beyond what they have achieved, especially with furniture, which is an unsung hero when it comes to the Chicago design world.”

“Furniture replaces us. We talked about the go-chair being organic. You don’t need people with the go-chair. You can walk in a space that is just pure concrete walls in a warehouse and if you light these chairs beautifully they are like people themselves; you can create the organic in them.”

“I just did a lecture in Cambell College in Prague this morning and they asked at the end what the difference is between an anonymous designer and a famous one and I replied that people like me have energy levels that are surreal. Jumping from Tokyo to here, to there and that's not easy, that's trying, that's doing, that's meeting people, that's dealing with politics. To get people to make the kind of stuff I’m talking about, they have to have a lot more money, they have to have an amazing trust and faith in what you do and that’s creating a whole new physicality for our civilization. If you look across Chicago you see examples of how buildings lean across the sky like a postcard but a lot of these new buildings look like they’re 25 years old. Why build a building that looks 25 years old?

I’ve got this guy in Tokyo, Mr. Ander, he wants a building to be built as the first plastic building in Tokyo and I can’t believe it actually!”

"The first plastic building? What do you mean?"

It's made of a type of poly-plastic, it's 8 floors in a place called Shibuya (in Japan)

"It’s an idea, have you put it to paper yet?"

“Well I’ve started to sketch it out. Thing is you don’t know if these people are real or not! They talk so casually; last time I met him, which was just in December, I must’ve pulled a face when he said he’s only got a 10,000 square foot block; in Shibuya, that’s worth a fortune. I must have made a funny face. When I met him again in February I said ‘What happened?’ and he said ‘You weren’t happy with the 10,000 so I pulled more land!’ Where else in the world do you get that respect? So that’s cooking and things take a while.”

"Do you sketch everything or do you computer-base your designs?"

“I work with all mediums, but basically I try to work with a sketchbook, which means I’m autonomous because I’m on a plane. I fill a sketchbook every month. At some point in my life I’ll probably have a show of all my sketchbooks; they are stuffed full of ideas. It’s funny on planes because people don’t know who you are. Obviously you're doing pretty well, you could be an investment banker or someone seriously rich until you get your sketchbook out and when you do get your sketch book out they’re like ‘Bloody Hell!’. It’s a real hard thing to deal with!”

I was going somewhere recently with Aideen and it was lovely; she got her sketch book out and in the sketch book, people in the studio had cut the paper out and had laid a pen in one side and a paint brush in the other. What she does is draw with the pen and licks the paintbrush and traces these amazing shadows, like watercolor, and these books are sensational. They will be worth a lot. In the future you could be paying around $100,000 per sketchbook.”

"Your sketchbooks in general will be worth something some day I’m sure."

“That’s the idea!”

"Tell me your final thoughts. What do you suppose your future endeavor will entail? Do you have some premonition or do you just walk into your subject matter?"

“I am an absolute committed futurist. I actually don’t live in the time zone I stand in; I don’t look back. I want to produce things that perhaps, when I’m dead and buried or whatever, people will say that guy really had a scintillating view of how life could be. So basically, being ahead of one’s time, pushing the materials technology, new physicality so changing the texture of the life around us. I’d like to take the car and reinvent the car so that perhaps when a car goes passed you take a deep breath and say ‘Thank God for cars!’”

The sun started to set and there was talk of taking the party off to Sonotheque the newest DJ club in Chicago. We heard there was a Holly Hunt open bar till 10:00 PM

More on Ross Lovegrove from our comrads at Desingboom here.