Saša Štucin and Nicholas Gardner from Soft Baroque create the unusual
Playful, subversive, unpredictable – the work of the ‘restless’ design duo that makes up Soft Baroque is hard to pigeonhole but is certainly turning heads.
Coffee Table 005 is a massive hunk of pine that looks like a cross-section of a log cabin turned on its side, with chunky notch joints that are somehow both rational and implausible. It weighs 70kg and is part of the first collection of Vaarnii, a Finnish furniture company that, among other things, is trying to persuade people to reconsider pine as a quality, characterful material. One way to do that is to commission some of the hottest names in contemporary design to create original production pieces.
For the coffee table, Vaarnii founder and CEO Antti Hirvonen simply asked the design duo Soft Baroque for “an amazing statement piece”. He says he’s super happy with the result, which talks to Vaarnii’s background and plays up the concept of contemporary craft. “For a Finn it gives an immediate idea of a traditional log house,” he says. “In addition to the scale and celebration of the raw material, I think it is the conundrum of how it actually has been made that makes it a very interesting design.”
Soft Baroque is the working name of Saša Štucin and Nicholas Gardner, whose practice, like its name, riffs on typologies and taste. They coined the expression after seeing an ornate painting presented in a puffy frame at an art fair, and while their work is underpinned by serious ideas, they try not to take it too seriously.
Gardner, who grew up in Melbourne’s Northcote, studied furniture design at RMIT before heading to London 11 years ago to do a masters at the Royal College of Arts. There he met Štucin, a fine arts and design graduate from Slovenia, and they became partners in life and work. After they graduated from RCA in 2013, he in design products and she in visual communications, they used Soft Baroque for their weekend projects. By the time they set up in practice full-time in 2018, the name had stuck.
It suits them not to work under their own names and it also expresses what they do: upending ideologies or strictures about furniture and function. Blurring boundaries between functional design and conceptual art. Playing with digital and analogue, technology and craft. “The name started with a joke and we have always had a sense of humour about everything we do, riffing on different things we see, designs or just art in general,” says Gardner.
With the coffee table, they wanted to reference Vaarnii’s Finnish background and domesticate the log house joint, but make it comically oversized and seemingly digitally morphed. “We are trying to make pieces that are a critical statement or positive statement or whatever, but that also have an interesting craft background or some material quality or manipulation. Sometimes it’s just like, yeah, it’s a chair or it’s very straightforward, or other times it has this idea of a subversion or changing of a function.”
Unlike some designers who find a specific material or method and run with it, they range broadly, packing their works with references that move from Josef Hoffmann to Donald Judd or early 2000s Ikea, and using anything from coppiced hazel logs to Carrara marble or standard box section aluminium, often in juxtaposition to the norm. The marble is cracked and folded into precarious shapes called “Corporate Marble”, and the logs normally burnt for firewood become a chair for corporate use. Tufnol, a laminated plastic that looks like wood, is a favourite, and they have made benches and lights from bashed-up metal polished to shiny perfection. Several such “Stainless Steel Benches” sit in the Balenciaga store in Milan. “What’s it made of?” someone asked, when they posted a photo of the Puffy Bricks counter made for the head office of Swedish design brand Hem. “Jesmonite and balloons.”
It makes them hard to pigeonhole, but it keeps them engaged. “We are restless,” is the first thing Gardner says during an interview while they are working in Copenhagen. “We always try to have this balance to move from project to project, but it’s like there are so many ideas, why not explore them?” adds Štucin. The dilemma, if it is one, is that they are super skilled at making things. When they dream up a new idea, they can fabricate it themselves rather than having to find someone else to execute it. In the early days, interior designers or even gallerists told them “they would love to work with us but we make it a bit difficult because it’s hard to know what’s going to come out of us next, which I totally understand because we don’t know yet”, she says with a laugh.
But in the seven years since their first breakout show in Milan, the pair have forged a discernible language or approach, and built a practice around exhibitions, design shows and private commissions. “People are starting to understand,” says Štucin. “Maybe we have done enough now that people are not so insecure.”
The exhibition in Milan in 2015, New Surface Strategies, came about by happenstance. After graduating, Gardner worked as an assistant to Max Lamb. When the British designer was planning his seminal Exercises in Seating, he offered them a space next door, suggesting they also feature seats. But that was too much pressure. How do you show a seat next to 41 of Max Lamb’s? asks Štucin. “We didn’t want to go down that route and try to find a new process or new materials, so we thought, how can we be smart about this? Well, we can digitally find all these different materials; there’s a lot to say about this and this is our territory.”
They made rudimentary Enzo Mari-type chairs of yellow pine planks covered in chroma-key blue that works like a green screen. By projecting images, they could digitally morph them into an ever-changing kaleidoscope of colours, patterns and textures. Amid the usual noise of Milan design week, they made a mark with their clever critique of the constant quest for the new and exploration of infinite digital capacity versus the “real” world. Artsy nominated them one of five breakout designers of 2015, and they caught the eye of influential tastemaker and PINUP Magazine editor-in-chief Felix Burrichter, who championed them in the magazine and subsequently included them in various curatorial projects. “I admire the way they play with contemporary concepts of objecthood and material value while also creating beautiful work that is always a little ambiguous,” Burrichter wrote in an introductory note for their solo show Sun City in Milan last year, which he curated.
Citing their natural affinity for hybridising the physical and the digital, Burrichter deems the pair the first true millennial designers successfully practising. “I don’t think we are going to shake that,” protests Gardner. “I don’t even know what it means.” But they did start their practice working between fine crafting objects and how that works in a world full of digital systems or screens, says Štucin. “If you think about millennials in that context, maybe that does define us a bit?” she suggests. “Super technologically-based but also having this fetishisation of craft and authenticity,” says Gardner, finishing the thought.
In their early days of working together, their work was divided along these lines. Gardner was into making and materials, 3D so to speak, and Štucin imagery or 2D. As time has gone on, however, the delineation has melded to the extent that “recently we started to feel more like we became one person”, says Štucin. “We are influenced by the same things, so it’s hard to even break it down. In a way it’s amazing, but in other ways I also think, well what’s the point if one person could almost do this?”
“It kind of works,” adds Gardner. “Creatively we don’t have that much of a clear division but more on the day-to-day execution we have distinct skills and roles.”
The arrival of son Iddu (named after the volcano on Stromboli) 20 months ago has meant changes to how they work and where. Home is a state of flux. Until early 2020 it was London, but as Covid restrictions were being imposed and with the baby coming, they moved to Ljubljana for what they thought would be a few weeks. When borders closed, they stayed in the Slovenian capital. Somewhat wrenchingly, they got friends to pack up their studio and that marked their exit from London after 10 productive years.
But Ljubljana feels a bit behind and too small for Štucin, who grew up in the countryside nearby and was happy to escape. And much as they love the Melbourne lifestyle, enjoyed again during the recent Australian summer, they can’t imagine a working life there. “I’m not sure if we could do what we do here in Australia,” says Gardner. “I feel like there’s enough interest and exhibitions around Europe and in the US for us to make a living and also produce interesting work, but Australia is a bit more isolated from that perspective.” They may well end up in Milan, which has become a magnet for a new generation of designers.
In the northern autumn they were in Copenhagen working on a collaboration with Danish artist Uffe Isolotto for this year’s Venice Biennale Arte, which opens on April 23. It is a new role for them, as makers more than originators, although it builds on their original creations. In this instance, anodised aluminium benches made of standard box sections reminiscent of 2 X 4 timber with gashes graphically cut away to reveal the hollow structure. Not only are they technical replicas of rustic wooden constructions, they are made with tools normally used for wood. The bandsaw screams while Gardner works freehand, carving out chunks of aluminium like exaggerated weathering. “It requires a bit of an understanding of the machine – it doesn’t really like what we are doing to it,” he says.
The structures, inspired by traditional Danish farmhouse architecture, barn doors and the like, will form the scenography of an installation combining sculptures and artworks with an immersive video game. Conceptually the show is Isolotto’s, but their works weave into the narrative. “It’s a bit of a strange relationship because we are so conditioned to having this distinct, OK this is our intellectual property and this is his, but it’s been quite nice,” says Gardner. It brought them to Copenhagen for two months, where they worked in a historic sculptors’ studio, made available through a scheme providing facilities for making particularly demanding artworks run by the Danish Ministry of Culture.
The Danish capital has been fertile ground for them from the start, mainly thanks to their gallerist, Maria Foerlev of Etage Projects. In her unbridled advocacy, Foerlev is rare for that world, says Štucin. “Maria would never tell us this sells well, make more of this, whereas a lot of other galleries would say that.” Foerlev says she wouldn’t have it any other way, although sometimes she suggests they could go back and explore a technique such as “Corporate Marble”, which could become “like their thing… But they get easily bored and they just have so many great ideas. Some designers would get away with coming up with just one of the things they have done.”
Foerlev first showed them in the Curio segment of Design Basel in 2016, which was in turn her first outing at the collectible design fair. It was a brilliant way to introduce the gallery, she says, because Soft Baroque’s values sum up hers. “It’s not just for function or plain aesthetics, because that for me is really boring. We have so many beautiful things already but if it can incorporate the poetry of art and appeal to our psyche in a way, then that’s really interesting and this is all they do.”
Translating this to product design is tricky, but a realm to be explored judiciously with like minds such as Hirvonen of Vaarnii or Hem’s Petrus Palmér, for whom they made the “Puffy Bricks” counter and a soon-to-be-released limited edition of wiggly walnut frames. Palmér, the founder and CEO of Hem, says part of their appeal for him is that “I don’t fully get them. I don’t really know why they are making what they are making. They have this slightly wonky frame of reference that includes the digital landscape and that, of course, collides with the maker and a kind of materiality.” Developing furniture for mass production is a cumbersome process, he says, but the limited editions are an avenue for experimentation and exploring new ways of collaborating in a much shorter time frame. As for the sulphur yellow counter, Palmér says he basically designed the office around it.
The “Puffy Bricks” are made by filling balloons with Jesmonite, a water-based cement/plaster/acrylic composite, and then packing them into a formwork. The balloons squish into each other as the Jesmonite cures and are then removed, painted and glued back together. The result is this odd combination of rigidity and ooziness. “Coming into the office, that’s the first thing you see. It has this almost surreal quality, it looks so digital somehow, like a CGI rendering, you have to touch it to feel that it’s real,” says Palmér. “It really sets the tone; it looks like an otherworldly art piece, which is perfect – it lights you up in the morning.” Which may well be the best affirmation the designers can get. .
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