Studio Materiality

‘Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.’
(The Perfect Crime, 1993 – Baudrillard )

A series of un-corporate materials designed for studiomateriality. Essential in our designs is the materiality of Cooper Black, a heavily weighted, display serif typeface designed by Oswald Bruce Cooper in 1921, used by our client for the by himself designed logotype. Cooper Black exhibits influences of Art Nouveau, Art Deco and the Machine Age. Originally created and used in the sphere of Chicago and the Midwest of America in the 1920s, the type regained an iconic pop status in the 1970s. Although selected by our client by intuition, we believe that this typeface itself would exactly express conceptually the core of Studiomateriality’s concern.

Studiomateriality is working within the tradition of industrial design, creating objects for daily use that question relationships among reality, symbols and society. Their motto ‘This is a place made for fun’ we read by entering the Athens based workshop of Studiomateriality, is revealing a work ethic that balances between the lightness of pop-artists and the asceticism of the cynics. However, one thing seems to be sure: materiality itself occupies a central space in the creation process of Studiomateriality. Materiality in this case seems not merely a material to render any imagined object in, but here materiality is object, meaning and reflection itself. Thinking of ‘The System of Objects’ (1968) or ‘Society of Consumption’ (1970) in which Baudrillard theorizes that materiality has become irrevocably alienated and reduced into a system of signs, we could propose that Studiomateriality challenge in a playful format to reestablish a lost relation with materiality. Every generation has to reinvent the wheel and for post-Internet designers born and baptized in the core of a trembling ‘Society of Consumption’ material is per definition immaterial. It’s like Studiomateriality is playing with-in the ruins of twentieth century’s multiplex of meanings and understandings, this play between realism and representation that is as old as the world.