Delving into the
essence of things
All About the Basics
Asked about his personal design motto, Israeli designer Nitzan Cohen quotes Alberto Alessi: “Form follows fun.” Clearly, fun was involved in his partnership with Mattiazzi in creating the He Said and She Said Chairs. He describes the experience as “a joyful project with wonderful people,” and says it was “a great example that, no matter what technology one has—and Mattiazzi has the latest in CAD woodworking—it is still all about the basics, about carpentry work, an intuition for wood, together with years of experience, and most of all, tons of love for it all.”
Cohen says he begins his design process by “delving into the essence of things. I think for an extremely long time about a project before I make the first sketches. I get right down to the DNA, the core of an object. The idea has to be absolutely convincing—then I’m free and can add style elements, on a chair, for example, lengthen the armrests, or even reduce them extremely.”
Chair DNA
So when Mattiazzi asked him to design a new chair, Cohen began by asking himself a lot of questions. "You have to ask yourself, what will the character of this chair be, will it be 'loud' or more timid? You have to find its DNA. And, of course, one must always consider technology: What can we do with the technology we have available to us?" The result was a pair of chairs with provocative names.
You have to ask yourself, what will the
character of this chair be, will it be 'loud'
or more timid?
- Nitzan Cohen
He Said She Said
His inspiration for the names? A man and a woman having an intense conversation in a little Parisian bistro. “I just like it when things tell stories.”
Cohen studied for six years with Konstantin Grcic (who designed the Magis _One family) and credits Grcic with helping him learn “to give a form to my flights of thought.”
