Max Lamb

A native of St. Austell, Cornwall, Lamb earned a degree in Three Dimensional Design from Northumbria University in2003. Inthe same year he was awarded the Hettich International Design Award and the Peter Walker Award for Innovation in Furniture Design.

Lamb worked for a year in between his degree and his Masters, and during that time he was lucky enough to be offered a job with an interior design company in London: the Ou Baholyodhin Studio. It was his first introduction to London and also the professional design world. While he was working there, he was still pursuing his own work outside office hours and he did a number of different exhibitions. He  even exhibited in Milan with a friend. He states, ‘I was always more passionate about my own work so I decided to go back to education’, so he applied to the Royal College of Arts, where he did a Masters in design products.

The famous designer Tom Dixon was one of his tutors at the RCA, which was a useful introduction. After his first year he asked if there were any internship opportunities for the summer.

In 2006, he completed his Masters Degree in Design Products at the Royal College of Art, developing a concise, process driven approach to design. But a couple of months before he graduated he asked Dixon whether there were any job opportunities. His words were: “We’ve got the best job in the world for you.” Lamb was made the designer in a new part of the company.

After a year designing for Tom Dixon Studio, he established his own practice, in which he had complete freedom. He didn’t have a typical day as it depended on what stage he was at with his work. There’s a huge amount of travelling in the build-up to exhibitions, getting projects finished and visiting companies, manufacturers and suppliers.

In 2008 began teaching on the Industrial Design course at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne.

            He has featured in many exhibitions, but the piece of work he produced that really stood out to me, was the Poly Chair he created n 2006. Such a simple piece of work crafted so quickly, yet having the imagination to do something like it has really inspired me personally, as now I am always looking for something new and inovative to design, but something simple using natural shapes, surroundings and environments to inspire my thought. Similar to the thought process Lamb himself uses.

Max Lamb’s chair designs suggest an aggressiveness that is characteristic of the atavistic spirit in design today. In stark contrast to recent ethereal and romanticised design, or designs that transfer directly from computer to machine manufacture without human intervention, Lamb laboriously chisels, buries, grows and smelts materials into rugged and bold forms.

Further work of the polystyrene series was displayed at the fumi gallery in London, as to where the next pice of work is located that caught my eye, the Rusty Sheet Steel Chair.

In his accompanying document Exercises in Seating, Lamb describes how his perforations along bend lines were conceived to make assembly possible by hand, without the need for specialist machinery. The whole structure is fixed by simply two lengths of hi-spec double-sided tape, the epitomy of design for manufacture that is manufacture by an unskilled person. This steel chair can be assembled by the user themselves. Lamb says,

“I liked the idea of incorporating an additional hand-process with which to reinforce the one-off or low batch potential of laser-cutting.

 

It is details like these that make the difference between designs that the user can embrace, and feel ownership of in a creative sense, and designs that exclude the user from the initial synthesis of the product and must be sold readymade – and all it comes down to is perforations.