I fell in love instantly with Canadian designer Philippe Malouin the very second I came across the following images of his installation at this year’s Vienna Design Week entitled Time Elapsed. And that was before I saw his equally gorgeous face (“Hubba, hubba!”) Malouin’s Time Elapsed is one of the most subtle, elegant, and impressive installation works I’ve come across in quite a while, with its distilled and meticulously considered mobile elements, and its crystal clear concept. Very a propos considering Malouin was commissioned by the renowned Austrian crystal company Lobmeyr in conjunction with Vienna Design Week’s annual Passionswege project which pairs up select designers with traditional and highly skilled Viennese companies to develop unexpected and inspired collaborative results.
For Time Elapsed, Malouin created a rotating arm which meticulously deposits spirals of quartz sand on the Lobmeyr showroom floor. Moving in precise hypotrochoid patterns, the installation slowly gives birth to a ring of sand over the course of the week. With a similar aesthetic to a scaled-up chandelier component, the gorgeous piece was built by the expert craftsmen of Vienna’s prestigious J&L Lobemyr legacy crystal house, right down to the highly detailed screw heads specified by Malouin’s design. Malouin provided the following abstract for Time Elapsed: “The flow of sand through an hourglass is traditionally used to keep track of elapsed time. It is also physical representation of the fine line between the past and the future. Through the machine in this room, the deposition of sand forms not minutes and hours on a clock face but abstract and changing patterns, illustrating the link between time and decoration. The sand also holds a physical connection with Lobmeyr, since it is the raw material from which the crystal is created.”
Ohhhh Philiiiiiiiiiippe! You certainly know how to get my heart fluttering all pitter-patter-like. So yes, I will marry you! And feel free to sprinkle anything you like all over me for the next 50 years or so. To learn more about Philippe’s work, including links to all of his most notable projects, be sure to visit his website at PhilippeMalouin.com.
