Dutch designer Christien Meindertsma aimed to rebrand linoleum and set up a brand new visible language for the misunderstood materials with the Flaxwood tiles she has created for producer Dzek.
Very like conventional linoleum, the tiles unveiled as a part of an set up at Milan design week are product of linseed oil, pine resin, wooden mud and chalk.
However on this case, all of the pigments, coatings and backings that usually disguise its pure composition are stripped away, creating tiles with a heat honey color and the mottled texture of MDF.
“Flaxwood is an sincere expression of the substances which can be in linoleum,” Dzek founder Brent Dzekciorius advised Dezeen. “Linoleum has by no means been content material to be itself, so we needed to outline what it truly appears like.”
For the Milan design week set up, the tiles had been used to clad a monumental staircase resulting in nowhere, designed by Barcelona agency Arquitectura-G.
By exhibiting off the fabric’s sudden aesthetics and architectural purposes, the hope is that the venture will help reframe linoleum as a cloth of the longer term somewhat than only a holdover from the Seventies, which it’s usually perceived as.
Linoleum, in contrast to plastic-based vinyl and PVC, may be made completely from renewable and reclaimed supplies, in addition to being biodegradable and endlessly remoldable.
“It is like playdough or like a bread dough that lasts perpetually,” Meindertsma advised Dezeen. “It cures simply sufficient to turn into one thing stable however then you’ll be able to at all times resolve for it to turn into one thing new for those who want.”
“For me, that is actually the last word factor as a product designer,” she added. “I do not know every other materials that may do this.”
Flaxwood is the results of an ongoing analysis venture from Meindertsma that began in 2010 when she bought a Dutch farmer’s total harvest of flax – roughly 10,000 kilograms – earlier than it could possibly be exported to China the place 90 per cent of European flax goes to be changed into merchandise.
Testing the bounds of native manufacturing, the designer turned the fibres into yarn, rope, cloths and even a chair, whereas the seeds had been used to make linseed oil and with that a completely traceable, regionally sourced model of linoleum.
The collaboration with Dzek offered a possibility to resuscitate this analysis and switch it into an precise sellable product within the type of Flaxwood.
Whereas conventional linoleum is utilized to a jute cloth lining and hung as much as remedy in large strips, Meindertsma’s model is shaped utilizing a mould and a stress press, without having for a backing.
Additionally gone are the fossil-derived coatings and pigments which can be historically used to assist linoleum tackle completely different colors and patterns.
“Our course of is far more streamlined,” Dzekciorius mentioned. “We use so much much less power.”
Nonetheless, the present model of Flaxwood is extra of a place to begin than a completed product, for the reason that uncooked supplies are syphoned off from the economic manufacturing of flooring producer Forbo.
The final word purpose is as an alternative to create a linoleum that’s made completely utilizing native supplies and thus totally traceable.
This is able to permit the recipe to be customised with completely different substances, utilizing extra quickly renewable crops similar to cattail and reed from Dutch peatlands or wooden mud from completely different bushes to subtly change the color of the tiles.
“Linoleum is inherently an extremely sustainable materials,” Dzekciorius mentioned. “However there’s room for enchancment on it.”
“Utilizing extra fast-growth renewables as materials sources is healthier. And it additionally results in different aesthetic outcomes, which makes it actually fascinating.”
A number of of Meindertsma’s earlier tinkerings with the recipe had been on present as a part of the set up.
One pattern was colored with ground-up previous roof tiles and one other was made utilizing waste calcium carbonate, which was filtered out by a neighborhood water therapy plant, as an alternative of mined chalk.
“So you do not truly should mine it, you should utilize a waste stream,” the designer defined. “And it is already industrially taken out of the water. So it is actually no drawback to make use of that.”
There’s additionally the potential to experiment with larger thickness, which supplies the fabric extra rigidity and permits the linoleum to be sanded, lower and milled very similar to a bit of timber.
“It may possibly have this dimensionality, which I feel is actually antithetical to what individuals affiliate with it right this moment,” Dzekciorius mentioned.
“It may possibly have a density that’s sort of much like MDF,” he added. “It may doubtlessly be an enormous enchancment over one thing like that as a result of there are not any glues.”
However, to achieve its full potential, Meindertsma argues the fabric must be accompanied by an environment friendly closed-loop recycling system, so it could keep endlessly in use.
“An object that retains altering type – that might be my final dream,” she mentioned.
Quite a few different designers have began reappraising linolem for its sustainable credientials lately. Amongst them is Don Kwaning who tailored the fabric to type a vegan leather-based different and Eindhoven graduate Lina Chi, who made a collection of self-supporting furnishings items from a single sheet of linoleum.
Milan design week passed off from 15 to 21 April 2024. See Dezeen Occasions Information for an up-to-date listing of structure and design occasions happening world wide.
