Upstart designers don't all have a workforce of 40,000 assembled to produce their first product when they're still in school, even if that school is Design Academy Eindhoven. But the laborers drafted by 28-year-old Tomáš Gabzdil Libertiny to make his Honeycomb Vase are bees. Libertiny provides an amphora-shaped skeleton, and the bees do the rest, building out the object's structure. Each piece is different, based on the amount of time Libertiny gives it in the hive. A swarm needs a week to create each basic vase (and the insects only work from April to June), but the bees will freestyle if the object isn't removed right away, adding buttress-like attachments in random places. Libertiny developed the Honeycomb Vase for his graduate-school thesis, and though he's never been able to get it to hold water, it should withstand other tests. (Beeswax was, after all, used to embalm the pharaohs.) Practicality isn't always the issue anyway. The vase has already appeared as part of Droog Design's annual collection at Milan's Salone del Mobile, at Design Miami, and, most recently, in MoMA's "Design and the Elastic Mind" show. Four more vases with different levels of "ornamentation" are due to arrive at Manhattan's design mecca Moss this month. Not bad for a Slovakian kid and a bunch of bugs.
If it's clever to harness the "mass production" of the animal kingdom, it's also a cheeky reversal of what seems like the natural order of making things for human consumption. "Beeswax comes from flowers, and now it ends up containing flowers," Libertiny explains. (He also makes a solid beeswax vase that is washable, and is working on gold-plating other honeycomb fragments.) Such provocative flips are found in every object produced by the two-year-old Studio Libertiny, which turns out to be one full-time employee in a rough loft space with a wood-burning stove in a Rotterdam warehouse complex. (No hives are present — they board with various beekeepers.) There's the vase that looks like untreated pine, made out of glued and lathe-sculpted paper, and for Milan '08, in-progress furniture made entirely out of blobs of welding solder coated in black chrome. Chrome aside, he doesn't use today's "it" materials, favoring ephemeral, forgotten substances.
Tall, dark-haired, and dramatically pale, he's charming and unpretentious — a jocular Count Dracula dressed in thrift-store pants. "Tomáš is sort of poetic," says Ambra Medda, director of Design Miami. "There's something quite vintage about him, and he uses natural elements and natural craft, but his methodologies have never been explored before." The lamb-soft surface of his writing table, for instance, created only for putting pen to paper — "not for eating pizza," he says — is tens of thousands of strips of paper pressed together blade-side-up. It's pleasurable underneath a ballpoint, but it's no dream piece for a cramped apartment. Libertiny doesn't care. "We have an obsession with multifunctionality today, like a phone that does e-mail and has a camera," he says. "But there's something touching about reserving an object just for one activity."
