 Terry Mowers and Suzanne Tick are the founders of Tuva Looms, a New York-based boutique weaving and design company. From their split-level work-live space, they have developed a new range of stylish carpet tiles for commercial designers – all made from recycled materials.
Mowers and Tick recently visited Shanghai and Hong Kong as part of their work for Tandus, a US-based sustainable carpet-maker, which has one of its two global manufacturing plants in Suzhou, Jiangsu province.
What does carpet have to offer commercial design?
TM: I think carpet is going to take over the world in commercial design. Carpet has always been seen as the lowest-end of the food chain for commercial design, but in the United States we are seeing that view change. Carpet is being used now to create elements of luxury, akin to a residential thinking but applied to commercial design. We think that can translate to Asia.
ST: Our carpet designs aim to bridge colour, texture, patterns and plains across mill brands and product categories of modular, broad loom, 6-foot and woven. Balancing the elements of designs, technology and sustainability in perfect proportion, creating products with vision and purpose. We are looking at different levels of carpet, with layers and ridges that help define space. Carpet has never been used that way before, it has always been a cheap space filler. The applications are diverse for commercial design in offices, hotels, meeting rooms and convention centres. Building dense volume carpets can also have measurable acoustic benefits, which is important in a noise-polluted world.
Why did you choose to use only recycled carpet materials?
ST: My father worked in the recycling business, so I grew up with recycling, and it has always inspired my work as a weaver and an artist. We live and work in New York, which is such an influence for us in our work – there are so many cultures, people and so much art. We are also influenced by our travels and religious beliefs, and a desire not to further harm our world’s environment.
TM: Tandus doesn’t incinerate or landfill any product, and works with designers and contractors to help them salve materials, rather than use virgin materials. It’s a re-education process to get people across the construction industry to think about the design, as well as cost and environmental, benefits of recycling old materials. We have a woman in Georgia who built us a machine to chop up and regurgitate carpet tiles. That’s important to us, we don’t want to contribute to a product that causes environmental harm.
What is the purpose of your visit to China?
TM: To speak to designers and learn about current trends in commercial design, and to see what the market need is for our products. We are also spending time at the Suzhou factory to get a clearer understanding of local sourcing, and to see what machinery we will need to bring over from the United States. There is so much construction happening here in China, and designers are working so fast, both on each project and moving between projects, so we see that there might be a need for innovative new designnnnnnnnn materials. We are also visiting other Asian cities, including Tokyo, Singapore, Mumbai and Bangalore.
How do you create new products?
ST: All our staff work from our own home in New York. The lower level is a work studio, with weaving looms and computers. We start with the fibre, and build materials from scratch. We’re modernist in our thinking and structuralist in how we approach product development.
TM: Reclaiming old carpets frees up the design process. We personally go in and mine old office buildings to take back carpet tiles and recycle them. We then use ancient weaving techniques and marry them with new technologies and dye processing. We’d like to do that in China, too.
Do you use the recycled carpets for other applications?
ST: Tuva Looms has created a portfolio of woven fibre optic lights, blending traditional weaving with modern optics technology. We also create a semi-transparent design tile for walls, doors and partition screens using recycled carpet threads embedded in a plastic resin. It’s now a USD50m business with three spin-off companies, but we only came up with the idea because we were seeking a solution to an inventory problem. We needed to reuse carpets that weren’t selling.
What trends are you noticing in commercial design?
ST: We’re in a middle area period for colour right now, between black and white. Blues and greys dominate, now grey is washing over things a lot. Luminosity and different types of transparency are also influencing how we look at colour, and the extrusion of nylon we make. Graphics, too, are becoming more and more important in product design.
TM: We do see colour as getting a little darker but also still colourful – pigments and metallics are often being added to colour to add lustre. Plus, there’s a blurring together of colours, although colour contrast is still important. Red, for example, is used as an accent colour – a lot of companies around the world brand themselves in red. Also, colour is being influenced by decay and oxidisation. There’s also a definite trend towards what we call “nu austerity,” where less is more in terms of design and demand is for organic materials and sustainability, and a strong consciousness of things of natural beauty.
Last update : Sunday, 05 August 2007
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