Jimenez Lai x URBAN FABRIC's Limited Edition rug collection at the LCDF - Lake Como Design Fair 2019
JIimenez Lai works in the world of art, architecture and education. His studio Bureau Spectacular imagines other worlds and engages the design of architecture through telling stories. Beautiful stories about character development, relationships, curiosities and attitudes; absurd stories about fake realities that invite enticing possibilities. The stories conflate design, representation, theory, criticism, history and taste into cartoon pages. These cartoon narratives swerve into the physical world through architectural installations, models and small buildings.
“As a two-dimensional surface, the rug is a spatial medium for architects to experiment with the interior of architecture as both a spatial but also graphic condition. In this collection of rugs, we sought to explore the relationship between plans, elevations, and the possible three-dimensional applications of the rug as a two-dimensional graphic medium.”
-Jimenez Lai
The resulting collection of rugs blur these boundaries and definitions, breaching the threshold between floor and wall. “Corner Splat” is a rug that occupies the corner of a room, combining 2 adjacent walls with a section of the floor. The resulting plush ‘nook’ creates a new kind of space and challenges the notion of where and how we’ve used rugs for hundreds of years. With multiple geometries colliding, colors begin to mix, unmix, and denote the superimposition of an imaginary volume between the three planes.
Before founding Bureau Spectacular, Lai worked for various international offices, including MOS and OMA. Lai is widely exhibited and published around the world, including the MoMA-collected White Elephant. His first book, Citizens of No Place, was published by Princeton Architectural Press with a grant from the Graham Foundation. Draft II of this book has been archived at the New Museum as a part of the show Younger Than Jesus.
Jimenez Lai x UFR | Rug Collection
Limited Edition of 10
