medici low stool

Konstantin Grcic (*1965) was trained as a cabinet maker at The John Makepeace School (Dorset, England) before studying Design at the Royal College of Art in London. Since setting up his own practice Konstantin Grcic Industrial Design (KGID) in Munich in 1991, he has developed furniture, products and lighting for some of the leading companies in the design field. Amongst his renowned clients are Authentics, BD Ediciones, ClassiCon, Flos, Magis, Maharam, Muji, Nespresso, Plank, Serafino Zani, Thomas-Rosenthal and Vitra. Many of his products have received international design awards such as the prestigious Compasso d`Oro for his MAYDAY lamp (Flos) in 2001 and the MYTO chair (Plank) in 2011. Work by Konstantin Grcic forms part of the permanent collections of the world´s most important design museums (a.o. MoMA/New York, Centre Pompidou/Paris). Most recently Konstantin Grcic has curated a number of significant design exhibitions such as DESIGN-REAL for The Serpentine Gallery, London (2009), COMFORT for the St.Etienne Design Biennale (2010) and BLACK2 for the Istituto Svizzero, Rome (2010). Solo exhibitions of his work have been shown at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam, 2006), Haus der Kunst (Munich, 2006) and The Art Institute of Chicago (2009). The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) appointed Konstantin Grcic "Royal Designer for Industry", in 2010 he was fellow at Villa Massimo in Rome. Design Miami/ arwarded him the title "2010 Designer of the Year".

Among contemporary furniture manufacturers, Mattiazzi, the family owned producer of wooden furniture in Udine, Italy, is uncommon. While many producers in that region rely on third party factories and work in diverse materials, Mattiazzi operates with their own machines and hands, and has developed a healthy obsession for woodworking. Since 1978, when brothers Nevio and Fabiano Mattiazzi founded the company, Mattiazzi has steadily cultivated its local manufacturing culture. Their network of wood shops is diverse enough to support any manufacturing process the brand may need. Every shop has its own focus, from milling to lacquering, and a particular process always belongs to a specific part of town. But don’t let the neighborhood approach confuse you: Mattiazzi is no backyard shop. Their highly specialized craftsmen operate the most sophisticated machinery available to the wood industry. An eight-axis CNC milling machine allows wood to take the complex shapes associated with injection-molded plastic. Operating such a machine is an art and Mattiazzi disproves the modern myth that mechanized manufacturing is not a craft.