Dr Jüri Kermik

J.Kermik@brighton.ac.uk

Dr Jüri Kermik joined the University of Brighton in February 2003 and currently he is leading the Design Technologies subject area within the School of Architecture and Design. Kermik completed his design education at the Royal College of Art in 1998. His doctoral research focused on the history of plywood technology in furniture design. Kermik has gained an international reputation for furniture designs for small scale and volume production.

In 2002 Kermik was invited to contribute to Setting Pretty 1 & 2, an interactive travelling exhibition organised by Northern Arts, AHRB and English Heritage, held at Belsay Hall, Northumberland, and at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, 2002 – 2003. The exhibition, curated by Judith King, involved seating installations from internationally active designers. Invited participants included Karim Rashid, Eley Kishimoto, David Linley, Totem Design, Jüri Kermik, Langlands + Bell, Claudio Silvestrin and EOOS.

Setting Pretty was not just about chairs. It offered an entire landscape of seating suggestions, focusing on enquiry and subversion, informing innovative design developed in different historical and cultural context. Kermik’s contribution to the exhibition was an installation of 16 lightweight chairs (called ÄKSI). ÄKSI chair, launched in conjunction with the exhibition, was developed between 1998 – 2002 as an exploration of relationships between craft and industrial production.

In 2002 Kermik also published a monograph A. M. Luther 1877-1940. Materjalist võrsunud vormiuuendus (The innovation of form arising from the material), Tallinn: Sild. Developed from his doctorate thesis (Case study into the history and form of plywood, RCA, 1998), this publication presented the history of the A. M. Luther Company (one of the world leading plywood and furniture companies) with the particular emphasis on furniture design and plywood technology. A. M. Luther’s technological achievements and contributions to the development of modernist aesthetics and standardisation are also discussed in the context of British modernism. The publication received the Annual Culture Award 2003 from the Estonian Government.

In 2003, following the publication of the A. M. Luther monograph, Kermik was invited to curate an exhibition to showcase the company’s design legacy at the Museum of Estonian Architecture. The aim was to create an overview of the company’s design output, which uniquely span over 70 years. The exhibition took place in 2004 and included about 50 plywood chairs, some of which were identified through additional research during the preparation for the exhibition. To illustrate the development and application of industrial processing techniques, the conceptual theme of the exhibition followed ideas from early standardisation to modernist design principles.

An extended catalogue with the chronology of A. M. Luther’s furniture designs accompanied the exhibition (J. Kermik, The Luther Factory: Plywood and Furniture, Tallinn: The Museum of Estonian Architecture, 2004). The catalogue was published in Estonian and English to make this material available for international researchers. This project was supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment, the Estonian Ministry of Culture and the University of Brighton FRSF Small Grants Award Scheme.

Since 2006 Kermik is working on a project Encounters, through which he is seeking to establish and define a position in relation to a current international debate in design and craft concerned with the tradition and culture of making and the role of products-artefacts in contemporary living. Kermik is developing the project from a perspective of creative dialectical relationships and encounters between different ‘generations’ of attitudes towards traditions, technologies, the meaning and the value of objects. In 2007, the first collection of artefacts exploring the definitions and potential of contemporary chair design was showcased in the 2+2 exhibition at the Tallinn Museum of Applied Arts and Design.