Ronan Bouroullec

Notebooks, as a type of research, are something very familiar to me. Sometimes to understand things you need to draw them—exactly like we see in Anni Albers’s notebook.¹ To find solutions through line and drawing is to relate your understanding of technical relationships to one another.

In Albers’s time, paper and pen were almost the only way to quickly explore an idea. Sketching is the most efficient way to try to understand something mentally blurry—facts, or what you know to be true—and what you draw makes that blurry thing more realistic. Albers drew so that she could understand images that appeared in her head, controlling them through the notebook’s gridded paper.

I use a sketchbook like a pianist or a dancer. Though I do not practice every day, as the movement would then lose its charm. At the beginning of a creative process, I need to verify the curve or shape of something, the delicacy of a certain proportion—I do this through drawing. I have to draw hundreds of the same curve, similar to how a dancer repeats a gesture to find the exact right movement.

Kate Robinson

So you consider sketching to be a specific type of movement that is practiced versus a skill that is honed, which would mean that the gesture is more important than the sketch or process output itself. These sketches in Albers’s notebook are directly linked to her prints. Do you think she might have felt differently about the importance of process over result?

Bouroullec

Well, I have recently found that sometimes I do not draw at all. There is a very important Italian designer to me, Vico Magistretti;² he explained that a good project is something that you can succinctly explain over the phone.³ The project is clear and intelligent enough when it is something you can verbally describe.

Albers almost always worked with the same medium, which had a two-dimensional outcome: a print or textile. This way of working had an advantage, being something easily practiced alone, which led to a very good result. Because of the nature of her medium, she could test and verify a lot of things by herself.

Robinson

Do you think that Albers achieved Magistretti’s tenet of clarity of intention because of her ability to work independently? This seems to contrast with the way you personally work, with many stakeholders in any given project, and yet you seem to have achieved Magistretti’s clarity in most of your work as well.

Bouroullec

Since the beginning of my career, I have been very happy to be and interested in working with craftspeople. When I was lucky to be invited into the industrial process, to confront a machine, I liked the fact that my thoughts were being translated physically by a specialist.⁴ Alternatively, Albers needed to be directly involved in the entirety of her process from start to finish. You just need a cane and a kiln. It is clear she was looking for a craft that she could test quickly on her own, working by herself.

So, Albers created one-off pieces to furnish a certain type of project or space, sometimes for very specific subjects and clients. She then decided at a certain point to frame some of the work, and from then on, her weavings were considered art. I do not care so much about this distinction: Is it art, or is it textile? Rather, I’m interested in being touched by something. It could be as normal as, for instance, being sensitive to the way the light hits a cup of coffee in a café in Paris, which is beautiful because of the position of the sun, the texture of the table. In my case, there are so many materials and so many scales that it’s impossible to experiment by myself.⁵ You have to be very humble in our discipline, because you are working with craftspeople who have been using that material or technique for half a century. You have just arrived in a much greater context where, if you’re lucky, you get to work with someone who has spent many years looking for a solution that you have been looking for just a few.

Robinson

To summarize for a moment, for both you and Albers, the chosen processes and materials respectively cultivate possibility and opportunity for creativity within your fields—Albers’s through specialization within a certain type of art and design, and yours through the opposite, which is the diversification of method and material. The contrast of your methods really underlines the idea of there being no such thing as a one-size-fits-all process.

Bouroullec

It’s not so complicated to have an idea, but then you have to confront it—the weight of it, the norms surrounding it, the price of curving a tube with a specific radius, for instance. You have to be very empathic during this process, to be intelligent enough to make it evolve in a certain way, in a thoughtful way that doesn’t disturb the project or the idea itself but will give it more strength. For me, this is the most important aspect of our discipline: to be empathic, to absorb intelligently, and to play with the fact that you can be step-by-step integrated into your project.

Robinson

Yes—without empathy, you’re unable to clearly see the task at hand. I don’t know if Albers ever spoke about the same idea, but you can certainly find parallels in the way she talks about being in an open conversation with material and project objectives.⁶ How do you balance respecting a clear singular vision—one that, for example, could be easily described on a phone call—with the desire to explore many creative avenues?

Bouroullec

Important aspects of the creative process are pleasure and patience. And then, like Albers, you can spend your life with the same materials and the same geometry, or you can do many different things. I chose to do many different things and thus had a lot of difficulty creating this Willy Wonka world of possibility.⁷ With the owner of Vitra,⁸ someone I am on the phone with almost every day, I discuss everything from objects to our personal lives. He is very important to me and is very direct with me. He said that it was my principal problem, that I’m supposed to have a lot of possibilities, because I didn’t deeply explore a specific subject in my career. My career is an accumulation of things from different contexts. Albers and I have two very different types of psychology. For example, the creative process of Piet Mondrian:⁹ After the beginning of his career, he spent years perfecting a composition of lines, or fixing the exact tone of yellow and blue together. Compare him to someone like Pablo Picasso, who was able to jump from a very realistic drawing in the morning to ceramics in the afternoon in Vallauris, France, or to cardboard the day after. While I do not compare my life with the life of these men directly, there are so many ways to search and find pleasure in this patience. But as you are a student, you have to be open to these different paths.

Robinson

What do you admire about how Albers’s approaches patience within the process you’re describing?

Bouroullec

Albers is the type of creative person I admire, who decides to concentrate their work on very defined research, so they spend their life going deeper and deeper, almost always working with the same materials or considering a certain color palette.¹⁰ I would like to be like that. I see this world as a palette of possibilities. I want to test everything.

Robinson

I’d like to work like that more often too. Earlier, you were talking about wanting to respect craftspeople for making a single object by hand but then needing to face the reality of designing something for production. You then talked about how if you produce a lot of something, much more people will be able to access and experience it either because of sheer quantity or actual lower cost. Albers seems to wrestle with this idea of access, too—in her textile work, she’s making one-of-a-kind pieces but is simultaneously contributing to a body of knowledge that affects an industry.

Bouroullec

When I started in this discipline, I thought that a good idea was something that had to be shared—if we found a good solution, we had to share it—so I wanted to be an industrial designer, finding solutions that could be reproduced and that could be accessible. It was the same for Albers, in a certain way. She wanted to find solutions for the industrial process, to be able to repeat it. This was a point of focus for Walter Gropius as well.¹¹ He wanted to change the world through the different tools that appeared at the time: to industrialize things, to be able to, for example, produce thousands of metal pieces or textiles to make a curtain for a typical house.

Robinson

The various levels of understanding of the work, from the greater effect on all design, but also the impact on a more intimate scale with their presence in somebody’s life, in their space—this diversity in scale of impression is impressive. We should talk about her various media. Though this notebook is made up of sketches for her prints, what do you think about textile specifically?

Bouroullec

I’m fascinated by it. What I especially like is the beauty of it, of course, but it also requires a detective approach. It is interesting to me because if I consider my own way of working, my way of building an object, I need to start from a technical point as a way to associate two materials. Very often, the language of my work is the way things are connected and what type of language they subsequently generate as a pairing. Textile, for me, is something that is very complicated to intellectually build. Textile and the way yarn comes together technically haven’t evolved much, but the mechanical aspect of its manufacturing has changed—just think of jacquard.¹² Maybe Albers drew in her notebook in this way because of the influence of her textile work. Her loom or machine could be managed electronically or by hand, passing yarn. It was a very mechanical process linked to a grid. Her drawings and their expression were a geometry based on a pure understanding of this process, based on this grid. Her notebook reflected her imagination but was also very linked to this grid.

Robinson

Can you speak to any specific examples from the notebook that come to mind when you think about her imagination?

Bouroullec

[Points to specific notebook spread] These are two drawings made at a moment when she wanted to escape the grid. She was ideating. They were clearly research, aiming to be a solution. Here, there was something more abstract: the pleasure of being a bit off the grid. This is the notebook of someone who knew exactly what she was doing.

Robinson

All of her work prior to this sketch in this notebook was shading following the grid ruling of the page, and then the knots appeared suddenly. The break between the two is a bit shocking.

Bouroullec

I was thinking about this too. It’s almost the type of drawings that you do while calling someone.

Robinson

A doodle?

Bouroullec

Yes. When you are just using a grid to repeat, instinctively, a triangle or generate a pattern surface but without thinking.

Robinson

I’m thinking about what you said earlier about learning skills through repetition of a movement, a gesture. The appearance of Albers’s knots in the notebook let us know she had arrived at a new type of movement or gesture, a new type of practice, with a new resulting drawing.

Bouroullec

Because of the grid, I think her drawings are like those of a mathematician or scientist: beautiful for us, because the quality of the line is interesting. But what she saw in a drawing was something very far from what we are able to understand. We can read and look at her drawings for their practical or abstract aspects or for their interesting formulas. Like a scientist accumulating numbers, it’s very clear at the end that there will be an invention. It’s the same thing. It’s like a mathematician’s notebook, I think.

Robinson

Multiple levels of comprehension and appreciation depending on the viewer’s context.

Bouroullec

Full of mystery.