Material Tendencies: Tom Dixon
Text by Anita Hackethal
Berlin, Germany
31.08.15
Continuously diving into new worlds and unusual experiences, Tom Dixon likes to design from a naive, inexperienced perspective. His eponymous brand – a British design and manufacturing company of lighting and furniture, established in 2002 – shows that Dixon is a designer who completely controls the chain, from raw material to the client.
Probably best known for his passion for and long-term experience with metal – often working with iron, steel, copper and brass – we were curious to find out which other materials Tom Dixon likes to work with. Architonic caught up with the British designer recently to ask him which he would pick if he had to chose just one material for the next three years...
Tom Dixon: ‘I would work with nanotechnology. But I’m not really bothered. I mean, I’m quite happy to work with any material. I have lot of obsessions, which last for a year or two. I’m trying to think of what material I could not do without. That’s not fair to restrict me to a single material, is it? I’m interested in glass at the moment, although I wouldn’t like to be restricted to just doing that, but I could happily work for three years on glass and not get the end of it. I am also very interested in textiles, because I’ve never been very good at textiles, so maybe I have a soft phase coming on.’ He smiles.
Architonic: Is there any material that you could easily do without?
‘No. I love playing with all kinds of materials, so it’s really not fair to remove one from my palette. For maybe eight years, when I started, I was only doing metal – that was good fun. I could work for three years quite happily with plastic or with straw or wood, thread.’
