Philippe Starck is one of the world’s most creative talents. His designs range from chairs to houses and from toothbrushes to stools. His designs focus on aesthetics in simple forms. A combination of basics in function, elementary forms and clear functions result to beautiful, distraction less, simple objects that don’t go out of fashion.
Philippe Starck – The Biography
Starck was born to a French inventor and aeronautical engineer in 1949 and attended interior architecture and design school at the Parisian École Camondo. Starck began his design career creating inflatable objects and other items before he rose to fame for furnishing the French president Francois Mitterrand’s private rooms in the Elysée Palace in 1983.
Shortly afterwards, the Parisian Café Costes gave Starck an iconic interior design assignment that elevated him to international stardom as a designer. Interiors, custom furniture designs and creative lighting products, have always featured heavily in Starck’s works. Working with a partner, he has brought luxury apartments to the market under the YOO brand, alongside several hotel projects.
The Design Philosophy
Philippe Starck’s work is always an object of surprise, fantasy and fabulous imagination. He maintains the unique vibe that molds each object’s iconic stature and smoothly integrates it into our daily lives to serve both conventional and unconventional purposes like simply being ‘good’.
Philippe Starck largely (and justifiably) identifies himself and avail those products to as many people as possible, at a price as low as possible. This is the exact opposite of what design previously focused on – creating products for an elite few who had extra cash to spend on finer things in life. Starck has been a lone ranger in the democratization of design for a long time and has ventured in more areas of design than anybody else; from furniture to motorbikes and even space projects, he has explored it.
Conclusion
Philippe Starck’s diverse work is a product of poetic creativity combined with rigorous professionalism and playfulness. His capability to imagine simple solutions to complex problems and implement them effectively in a playful manner is both surprising and refreshing. His embodiment of his design in the service of masses has promoted the so-called ‘democratic design movement’ and paved the way for other designers to adopt a concept of reaching out to everybody with their design work.