↖ Diffrient’s World Chair for Humanscale (2009) continues Whelan’s innovation in meshes, which began with the Liberty chair in 2004. ← One of her pliant and form-sensing designs, Pinstripe features a thick, multi-filament yarn for improved stability and ergonomics. ↑A new mesh that Humanscale will debut this fall, Catena comes in a bouquet of spice hues: white and pink peppercorn, clove, turmeric, and green cardamom. industry standard of 30,000 double rubs – and works out post- production problems that surface through the end user. For Humanscale, she devised the reverse Wyzenbeek test, to develop meshes that are rugged yet kind to the sitter’s clothing. In this version, a pendulum wrapped in her mesh strikes repeatedly at a piece of standard wool suiting. For each new client, she imagines a tapestry of possibilities. She helped Spinneybeck, a Knoll company, expand its collection of leather wall panels by designing woven versions, in intricate structures and colour combinations inspired by a beetle’s carapace. “Our weavers in Italy loved it,” says Roger Wall, Spinneybeck’s president. “No one had ever asked them to do this before.” (Innovation has its risks, though; Whelan’s wallcovering collection for KnollTextiles did not fare as well. Made in collaboration with a rural Mexican mill, the line failed to meet commercial specifications for lightfastness, which resulted in an alluring yet unsuccessful product better suited to the residential market.) She also approached Nike with her envelope-pushing concepts. Ed Thomas, Nike’s director of material design, awarded her a master design contract so she could prototype her ideas for the company’s advanced materials research department. These include light-responsive jacket fabrics, still in development, to keep joggers safe at night. “It is a rare talent to move a material through the gauntlet of initial brief and ideation, prototyping and then the eventual layering-on of commercial sensibilities,” says Thomas. “You often find that those are three different skills and resources, but she seamlessly integrates these processes into her work.” Whelan has found a kindred spirit in Tumi, a luggage company that seeks out novel materials and models. Denielle Wolfe, the company’s vice-president of design, was already contemplating a hybrid textile, one that merges its ballistic nylon with Tegris, a carbon fibre–like polypropylene tape manufactured by Milliken. To realize this material, which would become the DNA for a collection launching in 2015, Wolfe turned to Whelan. “She initially took on the challenge to colour the un-colourable,” Wolfe says, laughing. Though Tegris could not be dyed, Whelan demonstrated that the hybrid industrial-quality product could be visually enticing. “She managed to dial in to the iconic elements of our product and interpret them in a weave pattern that makes sense, one that has a story and is also beautiful,” adds Wolfe. Whelan sees broader applications for this innovative material, and her excitement is palpable, but that might have to do with her new setting, too. From one room and a squeezed mezzanine in New York, she now has three spaces (plus two storage rooms) in Maine with views of the rooftops, the mountain peaks and the waterfront. One area is devoted to her loom, a dye lab and a sublimation press; and another to two drafting tables, so she can go back and forth between projects – just as Niels Diffrient used to do. Most of all, she has more mental and physical space to work on her ideas. “I didn’t come here to retreat into the woods and eat granola,” she jokes. “I came here to continue to grow.” One day, as we spoke on the phone, she interrupted herself mid-sentence to marvel at a dragonfly flitting outside her window. For someone who takes inspiration from her surroundings – from cable suspension bridges to the backs of beetles – this might indicate the shape of a weave to come. elizabethwhelandesign. com 62 sept <strong>2014</strong> azuremagazine.com
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