McCabe Share Favourite Canadian Design Icons
Shauna McCabe shares why Quebec’s Emile Lachance and Montreal-born Philippe Malouin have caught her eye as up and coming designers.
Shauna McCabe is the executive director of the Textile Museum of Canada, where she organizes exhibitions and presides over the institution’s 12,000-piece collection of original fabrics, ceremonial cloths and carpets. No stranger to curating (with previous stints at galleries in Charlottetown and Vancouver), we asked her to help assemble this page by choosing her favourite Canadian design icons and predicting the next big thing. Her picks: the Solair chair by Quebec’s Industries Emile Lachance, a family-run manufacturer specializing in plastic housewares; and the charming tabletop accessories by Montreal-born, U.K.-based Philippe Malouin. With au courant aesthetics, both works illustrate a thoughtful approach to material composition and environment.
Roadside Attraction
Solair chair
Production year: 1972
Price: from $129. Available at INabstracto and Studio Pazo
Its simple form is comprised of an injection-moulded plastic, concave shell perched on a steel frame. Solair was devised over a weekend for Industries Provinciales, which commissioned industrial design grads Fabio Fabiano and Michelange Panzini to build a chair that was affordable and fun. “It represented a striking innovation at the time, made of the most everyday materials. A fixture of 1970s backyard pools and roadside motels, the chair is inseparable from a moment and place,” says McCabe. “The landscape it conjures has such impact. It has an easy and comfortable functionality and a distinctive palette,” she adds. Thanks to local design buffs that rallied for its reissue four years ago, “the chair still captures the extraordinary in the ordinary – ensuring its status as a classic.”
Desktop adornment
MDF functional shapes
Production year: 2013
Price: from $218.
This collection includes a table lamp, bookends and a pen holder. Each is crafted by cutting out and stacking symmetrical patterns from laminated sheets of MDF, and polishing them to create basic forms that are similar to Lego-like construction. Imagined by Philippe Malouin – renowned for his monochromatic interiors and raw, untreated furnishings – the series celebrates simple forms made from components at hand. “His work is about creating a contemporary language of form and materials, that uses ordinary materials like timber and concrete,” says McCabe about this Canadian design icon. It’s quintessentially Canadian in its entrepreneurial and inexpensive approach: “Like the Solair chair, there is a complete absence of complication. Each piece achieves very simple geometry – a perfect and streamlined fit of form to function.”