Hastings Space Odyssey
By Jevron Ash
What do these have in common: the designs behind Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey, Star Trek, the pod-like prefab ‘Futuros’ houses of Matti Suuronen, Eero Aarnio’s ball chair, Andre Courreges’s Space Age fashion, Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ and even Edward Craven-Walker’s lava lamp? The answer must be a fascination for the space age. Boldly futuristic yet highly minimalist in approach, the Sixties obsession for space age design was extraordinary and made a huge impact on film, TV, product and fashion design even to this day.
Space-age design is still high on the agenda of contemporary designers like myself and my company, Jevron. Creating designs that capture the flavour of that Sixties obsession, I have created a new ‘Kinetic’ furniture project and so far it seems to have ticked all the right boxes. Even the word “Kinetic” is a marriage of my own experience working in film and TV and a brand idea for a range of designs that feature a connection between the movies and everyday products.
Aurora Ball Chair; Jevron in his workshop
I’m not sure where my influences for designing space-age furniture landed in particular, maybe it was my first job sweeping up at the back lot of the hit US TV show Battlestar Galactica when I lived and worked in Los Angeles as a teenager. Or maybe it was making the laser guns for the English National Ballet’s, Gerald Scarfe designed production of ‘The Nutcracker’.
I’ve worked in film and TV and on many London West End stage shows, learning how to design and build sets, make props and all manner of other things in between. I’ve always loved ‘the build’ process from initial design to prototype
and then on to the finished item. Product design and furniture making are very much part of that process too. My first foray into making furniture was in 2002 with my Nøgen Stol (Naked Chair) design. Influenced by Scandinavian designers Alvar Aalto and Hans Wegner, I wanted to construct a chair out of laminated wood but the production cost of doing so was too expensive. The Nøgen Stol chair had to be simple, elegant and quick to build so with a little ingenuity and some left-over materials from making the ‘Camelot’ and ‘Rancid’ castles for the ITV children’s comedy production ‘Sir Gadabout’, I used GRP (Glass Reinforced Plastic commonly known as fibre-glass) instead of laminated wood to achieve the design outcome”.
My interest in the virtues of GRP and learning learned how to use it came from Formula One and Le Mans racing car designer Bob Curl. Bob designed and built race car bodywork and taught me the skills to make things with GRP, and it’s ironic too. I got to know Bob when he was constructing the bodywork for Chris Craft and Gordon Murray’s ‘Rocket’ road car!”
So in a strange circle of events the Kinetic furniture project has followed that industry connection too, the ‘Atomiq’ and ‘Arq’ tables and ‘Aurora’ ball chair are constructed using GRP, making them very light and strong. The ‘Atomiq’ coffee table for example is made from several individual components, each moulded in GRP then bolted together” – a modular process to make designing and component construction much easier, plus offering an array of colour options from his highly vibrant Urban Abstract colour range.
The Kinetic furniture design project is certainly a new era for Jevron, alongside the making of props, costumes and other specialist custom products. A career building just about everything from movie cars, motorbikes and gigantic straw-berries for Trigger Happy TV, designing and making futuristic furniture is a whole new adven-ture and great opportunity.
• You can see the Kinetic furniture project and other news on Ash’s website: www.jevron.com
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