I will soon talk about Creative Waste, a movement I’ve been observing since 2015 sand lecturing about. Jorge Penadés works and lives in Madrid and develops ideas that aim towards a more responsible framework. I was lucky enough to see last week a piece of his work when attending a conference on new materials the Materfad celebrated in Barcelona. Listening and seeing all the new materials that are being developed is truly fascinating, you have the impression that for every single issue you can encounter in architecture, design, clothing, etc., there is already a material developed that offers solutions.
The mirror Jorge developed for his Structural Skin series was a self-produced unique piece. A trip to Japan inspired him to create an innovative material where he draws connections to the japanese philosophy to celebrate the beauty of waste, broken or repaired things. He created a new material with the industrial waste of the French fashion house Hermès. The coloring of the waste was therefore not deliberately chosen, but played by the rules of coincidence and created a new material. Simultaneously he played with geometrical forms wich adds a lot of interest to the object. We love his multi-disciplinary approach where the materiality of the object is a starting point to design.
Other projects he has been working on and are not less interesting are those side tables created again out of leftovers and offcuts from the leather industry. The four faces of each leather slat have been shaved in order to emphasize the potential of the material’s language and its colorful and visual qualities. All you want to do is touch the surface and see if it is as soft as it looks like.
