Selected Works /

In partnership with

Client

GHYCZY

Location

Amsterdam, Swalmen

Year

2019 - 2022

Services

Creative Direction, Brand Architecture, Brand Guideline, Editorial Design, Digital Design, Website Build, Social, Campaigns

Team

Creative Direction, Brand Architecture, Brand Guideline, Editorial Design: Raisa Torres
Editorial Design, Digital Design, Website Build, eCommerce, Curated Social, Campaigns: Marcel Singer

GHYCZY is a family heirloom, founded in 1972 by acclaimed architect and designer Peter Ghyczy whose prolific career has pioneered techniques of furniture making that have influenced the design industry for 45 years.

Today, GHYCZY, still remains a luxury brand for design lovers with its timeless design, meticulously sourced materials and articles which are handmade by a selected group of bespoke artisans. Resulting in a collection of furniture that is a culmination of technical mastery, conventional luxury and to be enjoyed comfortably.

Over the past 50 years the GHYCZY collection has grown organically from Peter Ghyczy’s relentless creativity and innovative spirit. His designs were constantly evolving, but the entire collection is united by the trademarked casting and clamping techniques of solid material that he personally developed. These groundbreaking methods not only paved the way for new modernist design expressions, it also allowed for minimal use of material.

Inspired by his travels and migration, the distinct GHYCZY aesthetic captures Peter Ghyczy’s unique cultural heritage and his eclectic, elegant eye.

A whole life’s journey and a story of post-war design in Western Europe. Inspired by the heritage, its early design and material researches, discoveries and innovations. An era characterized by re-thinking of forms and lines, needs and practical uses on the search of new horizons, space age designs in the late 60s, round organic amorph forms and design languages, the objects – the children of their time and nevertheless today also ageless like the Garden Egg Chair.

In our days, in this very moment, design classics, part of the 20th century design canon honoured by institutions like the Victoria & Albert Museum in London or the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein in South Germany, which not only is located in the Eames Street but also exhibits their designers and collections in a museum by Frank Gehry.

We see nearly shivering lines on paper, lenses on the designer’s drawing table, papers with a red stamp, sealed with the letter G, rays of light coming through the windows in the showroom, calmness, a former water castle in South of Netherlands, blocks of wood in the parque, waiting to be dry enough to get transformed into another status of being. From the outside to the inside, from Nature to Design. From Materia to Thought.

Accompanying through the process of unfolding the character, the strength and the timelessness of its heritage and personality asking the principle questions after all the decades of creation.

Designing means creating order. That is, designers are engaged in giving matter meaningful structure, and so move, whether they see it this way or not, in virtually ontic dimensions. Even inanimate matter is structured. The incomprehensible vastness of the solar systems and galaxies enthrals us, as does the microcosm of atoms – all the more so when we recognize the astonishing similarities between them. The more advanced the development of a life form, the more complex its structure. Understanding ourselves as a part of these systems perhaps doesn’t lead directly to practical solutions, but it makes us aware that we’re integrated in a greater whole and heightens our sensitivity to parallelisms. – Peter Ghyczy

Like in architecture, the design objects work on two sides, they are materialized thoughts, materialized ideas. But with their design and form language meubles for practical use. Form follows function you have in mind experiencing Peter Ghyczy’s pioneering casting and clamping technique which he developed in the 80s.

During one of our studio visits, where I had the honour to receive a wonderful espresso, made by the designer himself, like a well experienced barista, one sentence about visual language and photography of his collections will be always actual and is frozen in time: A collector, a human being has to understand each design in a millisecond, in a blink of an eye, the same for a photography of the design object. If the beholder could not, the image or the object has failed.

I’ve been a designer since the 1960s, a time when design was a new term in Germany and had about it something of the rebellious spirit of the era. Having originated in the Italian disegno and journeyed, via the French dessin, into English and beyond, the word has meanwhile firmly embedded itself in our globalized language. But this shouldn’t keep us from reflecting on the well-worn term, which is strug- gling under the weight of the history it carries within it. This hull of a word embraces striking extremes of meaning. Many of our contemporaries think of the designer as a kind of charlatan, a pyrotechnician who recasts everyday objects in dazzling new forms and colours. The polar opposite of this image is per- haps that of the earnest idealist bent on improving the world through his creative works – le createur, as expressed in French, which would seem to equate the designer with God himself. Conversely, in dis- cussion of evolution, God is often referred to as the intelligent designer. While it certainly does me good to be able to fiddle with creation, perhaps even optimizing some small screw or other, the truth lies, as always, somewhere in between the extremes. The recent trend has been to hype designers by heaping on them titles like star designer, top designer and designer of the year. But wouldn’t it be nice if someone somewhere were to confer the title intelligent designer? – Peter Ghyczy.

My designs take their orientation from their purpose. They’re based on technical solutions that I apply in a new way. Again and again, technology plays the central role in determining their form – that is, it’s the force of reason that pervades the design. Designing can nonetheless be a spiritual passion. In this sense the designer is indeed close to the divine, practicing, as he does, a profession that affords him the chance to further evolution. It was Raymund Loewy, my great Franco-American colleague, who long ago pointed out this parallel and himself exemplified how this process never traces a straight and continuous trajec- tory. In design, as in natural evolution, not every new species represents a desirable step forward with a promising future. On the contrary, sometimes they can’t even take the strain of everyday live, even or especiially so, when the media takes a liking to their outer form. What lies beneath the most seductive outer form may in fact not be up to the strain of everyday life. Not infrequently, mutations arise and are released into the wilds of the market, although they aren’t fit for survival and may not even strive to be. This phenomenon has often borne strange fruit, especially since design took up with art. The pages of design books and magazines are littered with chairs no one would want to sit on. When designers suc- ceed with products whose main purpose is to land in a museum, the point of their actions must be called into question. – Peter Ghyczy

Throughout my architectural studies no one ever mentioned aesthetics, beauty or harmony. These things were taboo, at least in seminar rooms and lecture halls. European culture of the twentieth and twenty- first centuries, which believes itself to be so enlightened, has incredible difficulty with the definition of beauty, so it simply avoids this domain. The notion of good taste, which, while problematic, always had a central function in society, is difficult to nail down and so is set outside the opinion-makers’ discourse. That surely also has historical reasons. The world of the bourgeoisie failed during the First (and Second) World War. As a result, its aesthetic was discredited as well. Dissonance was embraced, in music and especially in painting. Since then, harmony has largely been branded as reactionary. Beauty in art is still viewed with suspicion; it’s considered to be untrue. Terms such as beautiful and decorative have been shifted in the direction of kitsch. But is this not just a new dictatorship of taste – of the kind that modernism actually wanted to overcome? I can’t accept the defamation of the beautiful and the decora- tive, qualities that today only seem to be allowed when cloaked in postmodern irony. The Viennese Josef Frank was a non-dogmatic pioneer of modernism, a fighter against narrow-mindedness right from the beginning. He didn’t merely propagate openness in dealing with the diverse sources of our aesthetic heritage – he practiced it. Frank, an architect, designer and emigrant like myself, is close to me in this regard. – Peter Ghyczy

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