OBJECTSSB-OBJ-006

Lucas Cambier

Lucas Cambier · 2022–

OVERVIEW

A designer working under a collection title he calls Soft Brutalism: monolithic geometry in materials that are warm or irregular rather than cold. The pieces are released individually and dated, from the L4 Stool in 2024 through to the Octo Lamp and Cassaforma Coffee Table in 2026.

The forms are blunt and single-volume; the surfaces are not.

WHY IT MATTERS

A useful current 'soft brutalist' direction: monolithic geometry tempered by organic materiality.

CONTEXT

The phrase brutalism attaches to a great deal of contemporary furniture, usually meaning nothing more than heavy and grey. Cambier's use of it is more specific, and the qualifier is doing the work: the mass is brutalist, the material is not.

The Cassaforma coffee table takes its name from casseforme, the Italian for formwork, which is the tell: the reference is to how concrete is made rather than to how it looks.

WHAT TO NOTICE

01One volume, then one softeningEach piece is a single heavy form with exactly one gesture that undercuts it: a radius, a nap, a colour.
02Formwork as subjectCassaforma names the mould, not the cast. The pieces are interested in the process that leaves the mark.
03Dated releasesWork is published piece by piece with a year attached rather than in collections. The catalogue reads as a sequence of positions.

CONNECTIONS

THE MARK OF THE MOULDSainte-Bernadette du Banlay / Claude Parent + Paul Virilio
Cambier names a table after casseforme, the formwork, not the cast. Parent and Virilio left the shuttering grain across the whole church. Both are interested in the thing that made the surface rather than the surface.