Dry Wit and Salvaged Drawers: Droog, Eindhoven and the Making of Dutch Design

Tejo Remy designed a chest of drawers in 1991 that was not really a chest at all. He collected mismatched drawers, set each in a new maple housing, piled them up and tied the stack together with a jute strap. Droog Design, which took the piece into its collection, explained the logic in terms of memory: “Each drawer carries its own memories and these are all jumbled up in your head. So the chest must be just as chaotic.” The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh owns an example, manufactured in 2004, under the title You Can’t Lay Down Your Memories.

The piece is a good place to start with contemporary Dutch design because it shows the habit that made the field famous. The object begins as an idea, the idea is stated plainly, and the materials are whatever the idea needs, including other people’s cast-off furniture.

A stand in Kortrijk

Droog grew out of an exhibition stand. In 1993 Renny Ramakers, then editor-in-chief of the Dutch magazine Industrieel Ontwerpen, showed a group of cabinets by young designers at the design fair in Kortrijk, Belgium. According to the Louis Kalff Instituut, the makers included Jan Konings and Jurgen Bey, Piet Hein Eek and Tejo Remy. The presentation went on to Arnhem and Amsterdam and drew enough attention that Ramakers approached the designer Gijs Bakker. Together they set up the Droog Design Foundation, with the stated aim of promoting this strand of Dutch design abroad.

The name means “dry”, and the selection lived up to it. Ramakers and Bakker described the work they chose as original, conceptual, humorous, sober and archetypal. Droog was first a collection of products picked by the two founders, then also a sales organisation, and finally a name under which they ran projects, some experimental and some commercial.

The international breakthrough came quickly. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art notes that Droog’s first collection, shown in 1993, won wide recognition at the Milan Furniture Fair that year. Through Milan and through museum exhibitions, designers such as Marcel Wanders, Richard Hutten and Hella Jongerius came to international notice. Many of the early pieces remained prototypes for some time; putting them into production was difficult at first, though that changed over time.

Eighty-five bulbs

One object in that first collection explains the appeal in a single glance. Rody Graumans’s 85 Lamps, of 1993, is a chandelier assembled from nothing but eighty-five black electrical cords, eighty-five sockets and eighty-five bulbs. The cords are bunched tight where they meet the ceiling and spread out below to carry the mass of lights. There is no frame, no shade and no ornament. The fixture SFMOMA acquired in 2001 stands about 110 centimetres high.

The museum places Droog within a wider Dutch tendency: a stance against consumerism, a taste for industrial and recycled materials, and an approach it calls minimalist. That is fair as far as it goes, but 85 Lamps is also funny. It takes the most ordinary component of an electrical installation and multiplies it until it becomes a chandelier, the most formal kind of light there is.

High technology, low craft

Droog did not only work with found parts. The foundation also set up experiments with outside partners, among them Dry Tech, run with the aerospace laboratory in Delft, alongside projects on porcelain and on ecological themes.

The best known result is Marcel Wanders’s Knotted Chair of 1996, now in the collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Wanders took macramé, a craft that had long gone out of fashion, and knotted an entire chair from it. In place of sisal rope he used reinforced aramid with carbon fibre, and then soaked the finished net in epoxy resin so that it hardened into a rigid seat. The chair was produced by Droog through the Dry Tech collaboration with aerospace engineers at Delft University of Technology.

The pairing tells the story of the movement in small. A homely, slightly embarrassing domestic craft meets a laboratory material, and the result is a chair that looks soft and is not.

The school behind the collection

Droog did not appear from nowhere, and neither did its designers. Both Ramakers and Bakker taught at the academy in Eindhoven, where, in the Louis Kalff Instituut’s phrase, they put the emphasis on “mentality and concept, rather than style.”

That academy has a long history. Design Academy Eindhoven was founded in 1947 as the Akademie voor Industriële Vormgeving, the first school in the Netherlands set up specifically to teach industrial design. Its first creative director, Renee Smeets, ran it for two decades. The school’s own account of its history stresses that from the start industrial designers were expected to be competent in technical, aesthetic, social and cultural matters.

The turn that produced the generation around Droog came under Jan Lucassen, director from 1983 to 1999. He rebuilt the curriculum around human needs rather than products, organising the school into eight departments named after areas of life such as living, working, food and transport. In 1999 Lidewij Edelkoort took over and gave the institution its current name, Design Academy Eindhoven, to stress its location and raise the school’s profile abroad.

The academy’s annual Graduation Show became its public face. The first was held in 1991 in the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam. In 2001 it moved to De Witte Dame in Eindhoven, the school’s building, where it stayed for seventeen years. In 2018 it moved again, to the former Campina milk factory, doubling its floor area from 5,000 to 10,000 square metres. Recent editions have drawn between 35,000 and 45,000 visitors a year.

Recognition at home

In 2007 Ramakers and Bakker received the Benno Premsela prize from the BKVK Fund, given for their commitment and to mark the importance of Droog Design.

By then, as the Louis Kalff Instituut puts it, the label had become synonymous with Dutch design. The objects that made it so are now museum pieces in San Francisco, Rotterdam and Pittsburgh. They still look like arguments rather than furniture: a stack of drawers about memory, a chandelier about the light bulb, a chair about the distance between a craft hobby and an aircraft. That quality, more than any shared style, is what the Eindhoven teachers were after when they asked students for a mentality first.