Droog Hammers Out A New Design Niche

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 11, 2006

AMSTERDAM -- On a charming side street in Amsterdam sits one of the city's most historic houses, almost a symbol of Dutch culture's hallowed past. In 1662, a crowd of Rembrandt's patrons -- the Dutch Masters of cigar-box fame -- posed there for his great "Syndics of the Drapers' Guild," surrounded by old wood and precious rugs.

Step behind the building's vintage facade, however, and you run up against the future -- the kind of setting 21st-century patrons will be pictured in. That, at least, is the hope of the radicals at Droog Design, the firm that now occupies the site.

In one front room, there is a table full of lamps, made of perfectly standard electrical cords with perfectly standard light bulbs soldered to the ends of them. Except those shining bulbs are drowning inside water-filled glass cylinders, with their cords in a tangle all around them. They reject Mom's warning that water and electricity don't mix; they seem to celebrate an obviously dangerous idea.

Nearby sit a pair of benches covered in fine leather, as in any fancy waiting room. Except that the tanned hide has kept the shape it had when the animal surrendered it. Each well-stuffed bench looks like a cow reclining in a field -- minus the head and feet that would have been removed after its slaughter. It's as though the animals are offering their backs as seats to us, their executioners.

Through a doorway there's an armchair. Or the germ of one: It's a plain box of highly polished steel, a yard wide by a couple of feet high, and deep. Beside it sits a sledgehammer. To coax out the cube's inner chairishness, someone will have to whack at it until it takes a shape for sitting in.

This is how a Droog home looks. It's strange, demanding and even rather messy. Almost Rembrandtesque, you might say -- or at least a bold attempt to rival the Dutch past the painter represents.

A trip upstairs through a warren of old hallways and chambers now repurposed as modern offices and workstations -- and repainted acid-green and pink -- spells out what Droog is all about.

"We always have said, and we still say, that for us, design is not a style. . . . For us, it always starts with a story, a concept," says Renny Ramakers, co-founder of Droog. Designers around the world now measure themselves against the Dutch firm; few are absolutely certain that they measure up.

The rooms downstairs are the company's showroom and retail store. Upstairs is the labyrinth in which its strange ideas are grown and propagated. On this spring afternoon there's a mad rush of activity as Droog prepares its latest installation for the annual Milan Furniture Fair. That's where it made its first splash more than a decade ago with strange objects such as a "wardrobe" that was a haphazard pile of used drawers held together with a tightened strap and a "chandelier" that was nothing more than a cluster of 85 bare bulbs. The firm should go back into rush-mode later this summer to prepare for a major survey of its work that launches in New York in September at the Museum of Arts and Design.

Ramakers, who recently turned 60, is not as sleek and fit-looking as many other Amsterdamers -- not high-design at all -- with a blond-streaked shag haircut and nondescript but comfortable-looking clothes. She could almost be a harried social worker. Thirteen years ago, however, Ramakers -- then a senior design journalist -- teamed with Gijs (pronounced Hice) Bakker, a well-known teacher and avant-garde jeweler, to unearth and promote designs that pushed beyond the status quo. The result was Droog (it rhymes, more or less, with "oak" if you cough as you let out that final "k"), which means "dry" in Dutch -- as in "dry humor" or "dry-eyed cynic." Its approach is meant as an antidote to the "wet," sloppy, style-conscious design that most of today's objects are drowning in.

The collection rejects the idea that ambitious design should be about a sleekly modern look-- still the norm for high-end products, from Apple's iPod to the Prius hybrid car. Instead, Ramakers and Bakker demand a powerful conceptual component, a driving idea: audience participation, even violence, as in that sledgehammered chair; or danger, as in the drowning lights; and ethics, as in the bovine benches. Or even smell, as in a recent series of lamps that look like pleasantly organic forms until they're lit and a waft of meaty odor gives the game away: Their bulbs are shining through the dried, inflated stomachs of dead cows and sheep.

We think of designers as the people who take care of how things look, with maybe a touch of function thrown in. Droog's truly radical move is to insist that designers should care most about what an object means.

"Modernism is only form and function," Ramakers explains. Whereas Droog products combine "form and function and emotion; form and function and a story." If an iPod's design stirs immediate emotions, and Ramakers admits it does, it's because of its look. Whereas the emotions stirred by Droog -- usually surprise and delight, but sometimes shock and even repulsion -- are about how an object works, and how its look is born in an idea.

Those lamps that drown their light bulbs, Ramakers says, have "a fantastic shape. What you see is very appealing." But their true force comes from a kind of backstory that they also deliver to you. Their effects come from "what is happening. And not because of a certain style."

Droog rarely generates its own in-house designs, since that would inevitably come to reflect only the ideas and stories cherished by its founders. Instead, the firm scours the world for designers full of all kinds of stimulating thoughts, then produces or promotes their designs under the Droog umbrella. Ramakers and Bakker think of themselves as curators and marketers as much as designers and of Droog as a cross between a brand and a museum without walls.

Those cow benches and water lamps and stomach lights on display downstairs in the gallery at Droog HQ aren't even officially Droog products. They are innovative objects snagged on recent trawls through Britain's design scene, where they were conceived by tiny firms such as Wokmedia (the water lamps) and Studio Bec (the benches and stomach lights). When Ramakers and Bakker discovered them, they had such strong hints of Droogish attitude that they seemed to deserve exposure in the exhibition space in Amsterdam. Some of them may even win the firm's imprimatur and a place in its catalogue.

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Compared with the high turnover of ideas in the fine arts, with at least a dozen nameable movements over the past 40 years, high design has been half-asleep for decades. Crisp modernism has ruled, with just a few minor interruptions, since about the founding of the Bauhaus school in 1919.

What Droog has done, really, is to look for the radical energies and idiosyncrasies most typical of recent fine art and push them into design -- an emphasis on politics and process, on ideas over craft and mind over matter, all features borrowed from avant-garde art that make Droog stand out from its competition.

Even a full 13 years on, few have caught up to the Droog ideal: to take the radical approaches of fine art, which Ramakers describes as "autonomous" from most everyday concerns -- a sculpture or a video projection doesn't have to do anything, except excite its viewers -- and make them work in the function-filled world of design, where a chair, however artful, also has to cradle a rear end.

There are scattered precedents for Droog's approach, and Ramakers happily acknowledges them. She insists, for instance, that most Bauhaus designs started out having a powerful conceptual component: All those first right angles and chrome tubes spoke about industrial processes, about new ideas of hygiene and efficiency, about rejecting the design ideas of dead Greek and Roman guys. They became sleek and superficial style only later on, when they worked less to provoke thought than to caress the eyes and mark the status of their owners.

Ramakers cites the dulling and diluting influence of big, moneymaking furniture companies that, to this day, "are more interested in style than in the concept itself." Those companies want to make once-innovative products into safe commodities rather than work to preserve the edge such objects had when they were first designed.

Concept-filled products had another minor revival in the 1960s, and Ramakers sees that era as the immediate prehistory of Droog. There was the famous Toio floor lamp, designed in Italy in 1962 with inspiration from the everyday: A Toio has a bare transformer base, a fishing-rod stem and a car headlamp shining at the top. A few European and Japanese designers of that time were playing such pop games. But their haphazard attempts at forging a "conceptual" design never had much impact overall.

Now, by curating lots of scattered but like-minded colleagues' work into a single, branded collection, Droog has almost cobbled a movement out of them. There are even cheap Chinese knockoffs of Droog products -- an accolade that may be more significant than all the cheering and prizes coming from design insiders.

"One of the outcomes of our activities is that we find a lot of designers all over the world working in the same spirit," says Ramakers. Not simply riffing on the look and feel of specific Droog products, the way knockoff artists do, but understanding that design can be about more than a look. "We give lectures all over the world, and they're packed with young people. And after the lecture, they come to me and say: 'Oh thank you, I'm so inspired.' "

Which, eventually, should help feed new and radically different products into the hungry Droog machine -- products that will surprise even Bakker and Ramakers, and which they hope will take the firm to places they could never have foreseen. Said Ramakers, "I can feel that we have influence on those young designers . . . and then it comes back to us."