Even though their work takes them all over the world, and the majority of their clients are now from mainland Europe, Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby remain essentially English in their references. It is the Englishness of a country that was once cosmopolitan and open-minded enough to take in Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Erich Mendelsohn as refugees in the 1930s and to find them some work.
It is a background that has equipped them to play a significant part in the evolution of design practice over the last 30 years. A close reading of their work sheds light not just on Britain’s recent trajectory, but also that of Italy, where one of them now lives. The fortunes of the companies that they have worked for have fluctuated and their ownerships have changed. These are factors that are rarely discussed in accounts of design history, but have a significant impact on it.
Early in their careers, Barber and Osgerby were closely involved with at least two striking examples of commercially led design initiatives. Nadja Swarovski, a London-based, fifth-generation member of the Austrian family-owned business, attempted to find a new focus for the company based on contemporary design. Established & Son was a different but equally visible attempt by an engineering company to enter the field of furniture manufacturing from a standing start. Neither were commercially successful, but the resources that went into them, and the publicity they attracted, certainly raised the profile of design in the wider cultural landscape, as well as that of the designers involved. Those two projects have faded, but Barber and Osgerby’s work from that period had a maturity that makes it still relevant today.
They have worked on design that is truly mass produced; the Tip Ton chair manufactured by Vitra, for example, required enough investment to build a massive 20-ton mould with no fewer than seven moving parts to make a chair that could be sold at a commercially viable price. Gas pressure pushes polypropylene into the mould to form the chair, in a single operation that takes just four minutes. Attaching transparent plastic glides to protect the skids extends the entire process of making a complete chair to just six minutes. At the other end of the scale, they have also designed a table handmade by skilled metal workers – a process so time-consuming and laborious that it was produced as a limited edition. They have worked on electronics, including prototype mobile phones for Panasonic, and studies for IBM’s quantum computers. They have worked with Galerie kreo on what is sometimes called design art and designed a lavatory brush for the German plastics company Authentics when Konstantin Grcic was its art director.
What makes them unusual in the British context, if not in the Italian one, is that their work is informed by an education that includes architecture as well as industrial design. Their time at the Royal College of Art, where they met as architecture students, was hugely productive, despite the unexpected challenge of finding themselves on a course in which the newly appointed professor, Theo Crosby, set his students the task of drawing the classical orders as well as lectures from Gaetano Pesce and Daniel Libeskind.
Furniture design is a synthesis of a response to the spatial context with an understanding of form, as well as the behaviour of the human body and manufacturing techniques. Double Space, the remarkable installation they made for the Raphael Gallery at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2014, demonstrated that synthesis in the most powerful way. A pair of massive rotating mirrored metal panels were suspended from the roof of the gallery. They were remarkable objects, ingenious and beautiful in themselves. At the same time, they also had a transformational impact on the space they were in, and on how visitors interacted with one of the greatest surviving Raphael works on paper.
The two designers were just 10 years old in 1979 when Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first female prime minister. They were making the first steps in their professional careers during the run-up to Tony Blair’s election victory in 1997. The Thatcher government had shut down large areas of Britain’s industrial base, leaving the country’s industrial designers with little option but to work for companies that are based elsewhere. Tony Blair’s administration embraced a more modern version of Britishness. Blair rebranded his political party, adding the word ‘new’ to Labour and adopting a red rose as its symbol. I have never asked them who, if anyone, they voted for, but Barber and Osgerby’s early work seemed to capture the sudden burst of optimism and possibility that political change opened up.
There was no official government creative director in the Blair years to match Richard Rogers’ role as an advisor on architectural and urban policies. However, Barber and Osgerby were commissioned to design the torches that were used to carry the Olympic flame from Beijing to London for the 2012 games. In the same year they were asked to devise a £2 coin, featuring the head of Queen Elizabeth II on one side, and an underground train on the other. The latter was not perhaps their most significant work, but both were projects that suggested that Britain had embraced the role that design can play in shaping national identity. Barber and Osgerby’s design language – colourful, sometimes playful, embracing bold, simple forms and also a degree of fascination for all things technical – set the tone for the period.
They form part of the generation of British designers who grew up in the analogue era and enjoyed dismantling and reassembling clocks and motorcycles. They made much of this when they were invited to show their work at the Design Museum in 2014 and opted instead to create an exhibition they called In the Making. The show brought together everyday objects, such as an aluminium soft drink can, a lead pencil, a laptop, a cricket bat and a cork from a wine bottle. They were displayed not as finished objects, but caught in the middle of the production process, to give an engaging insight into the process of making. Corks, it turns out, are cut in batches from a block of the material. Taps are cast not one at a time but in groups of four. A MacBook is milled from a solid block of aluminium.
Their career as furniture designers began with a reflection of the continuity of that English version of modernity. They set up studio in Trellick Tower, a brutalist block of social housing designed by the Hungarian emigre Ernő Goldfinger. Their first commercial product was Loop, a plywood table manufactured by Windmill Furniture, the successor to Isokon. Isokon was the company set up in 1931, which once employed Walter Gropius as its art director, and whose most important design was Marcel Breuer’s Long Chair. By the time Barber and Osgerby graduated from the RCA in 1994, Isokon’s founder Jack Pritchard had passed away, leaving the manufacturing rights to Breuer’s designs to Chris McCourt of Windmill Furniture. The two young designers had the confidence to go and see him in the hope of persuading him to take on the Loop Table, using his expertise in forming plywood to realise it. For both sides, it was an important step. It revitalised Isokon. McCourt renamed his business Isokon Plus, and went on to work on a series of other projects with Barber and Osgerby as well as other designers of their generation. For Barber and Osgerby it was a platform to find other, better-resourced manufacturers with access to a range of technologies beyond plywood.
In Britain, that would be Established & Son, a company set up in 2005 that brought together the finance and manufacturing expertise of Angad Paul’s family engineering business Caparo with the well-connected co-founder Alasdhair Willis. The following year, Established & Son took over the Pelota hall on via Palermo during the Milan Furniture fair, and produced a display showing work by Zaha Hadid, Jasper Morrison, Amanda Levete, Michael Marriott, Michael Young and Sebastian Wrong. Barber and Osgerby’s contribution was Zero, a handmade aluminium table. The presentation was impactful. Here was a company just over one year old, behaving as if it were a long-established heavyweight, spending a great deal of money, and presenting a generation of London-based designers that would expand to include Raw-Edges, Paul Cocksedge, Industrial Facility and others. For a moment it seemed as if Established & Son were about to become the design world’s version of Brit Art and Brit Pop. Sadly for Established & Son, which still exists under different ownership, it turned out to be a spectacular but unsustainable firework display.
For Barber and Osgerby, the relationship offered them another connection with the British incarnation of 1930s modernism. When they were commissioned to design a new chair for the De La Warr Pavilion on the Sussex coast, whose original architect was Erich Mendelsohn, Established & Son manufactured it.
They had already attracted the attention of Giulio Cappellini, whose leadership of what until 2004 was still a family-owned firm made it one of the first Italian companies to look outside Italy for designers. The fact that the first of their projects with Cappellini referred to ‘Loop’ in its name, like their project for Isokon, suggested that they had a strategic view of the arc of their own careers, and also that they needed a bigger manufacturer to realise the scope of their ambitions. In terms of making an impact on the market, persuading Rolf Fehlbaum at Vitra to make their Tip Ton chair was decisive.
The idea for the Tip Ton chair began as a conversation Barber and Osgerby had with the Royal Society for the Arts, working on establishing a secondary school in the Midlands town of Tipton, as a model for a new approach to education in Britain. They were looking for advice about the kind of furniture that would be appropriate for modern teaching methods.
For Barber Osgerby, the key to a school chair was to allow students the possibility of continually changing their position – dynamic seating – as the means of encouraging them to concentrate on learning, free from distraction. Fehlbaum was intrigued by the idea of devising a chair that would allow movement without any kind of mechanism. Vitra was a pioneer in making ergonomic work chairs based on complex springs and gas valves. This was a project that promised to be much simpler.
It took two years, at least 30 prototypes and considerable experimental trial and error to reach Tip Ton’s final form. They explored how a degree of movement could be incorporated into the seat, before turning their attention to the floor. Skids connecting front and back legs, angled at a slight tilt, could allow rocking and movement. Experiments showed that a nine-degree tilt would allow users to lean back and move forwards, and the profile of the back and legs was adjusted to allow a stack four chairs high.
It was the first of a range of projects for Vitra, of which perhaps the most conceptually interesting is Soft Work, that Barber and Osgerby thought could hasten the end of the office desk. Based on their observation of the way that people now use hotel lobbies, airport lounges and cafes as workplaces, Soft Work combines a modular sofa with adjustable tables on which to place a laptop or a stack of documents. At the same time, they were working for B&B Italia and for Flos, now part of the same group, and a reflection of the consolidation of the furniture industry and the tendency towards a blurring of the lines of national identity in design. Yet Barber and Osgerby remain grounded in their roots.
The Triennale di Milano’s exhibition on Barber and Osgerby is running until 6 September 2026, find out more here
This article is taken from Anima Issue 4, to purchase a copy or subscribe head here