Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec
Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec were born in Quimper, in 1971 and 1976 respectively. On leaving the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs, Ronan began working independently, assisted more and more by Erwan, who was then studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Cergy. They have been working together officially since 1999. Their collaboration is a permanent dialogue, feeding on their individual qualities and driven by mutual requirements.
Giulio Cappellini discovered them in 1997, when their ‘dis-integrated kitchen’ was presented at the Salon du Meuble de Paris. From this meeting was born an uninterrupted collaboration, which was cemented by numerous projects from 1999 onwards. In 2000, Issey Miyake called on them to design a space to house his new clothing collection A-Poc in Paris. That same year, a meeting with Rolf Fehlbaum, President de Vitra, led to the production, in 2002, of a new desk system called ‘Joyn’, which marked the début of their collaboration.
Today, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec work regularly with a number of manufacturers such as Vitra, Cappellini, Issey Miyake, Magis, Ligne Roset, Habitat and Kréo. Simultaneously, they also work on architectural projects such as ‘la Maison flottante’, an artist’s studio destined for the Centre d’Art, Chatou.
Elected ‘créateurs de l’année’ at the Salon du Meuble in 2002, they have been awarded, to name but a few, the New Designer Award of the New York International Contemporary Furniture Fair in 1999, the Grand Prix du Design de la Ville de Paris in 1998 and the first prize in the Biennale du Design de Saint-Etienne in 1998. They were also named Designers of the Year by Elle Décoration Japan in 2003.
Their pieces have been shown in numerous collective and personal exhibitions such as ‘Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’ at the Design Museum, London in 2002. In June 2004, a personal exhibitions was dedicated to them at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Ronan et Erwan Bouroullec have been the subject of two monographic publications: ‘Ronan et Erwan Bouroullec – Catalogue de raison’, Editions Images Modernes/ Kréo, 2002 and ‘Ronan et Erwan Bouroullec’, Edition Phaidon, 2003.
They lecture from time to time in a number of art or design schools. Ronan Bouroullec lectures at the Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne, Switzerland.
