Hella Jongerius was born in Holland in 1963; in 1993, after graduating from the Industrial Design Academy of Eindhoven, she founded the Jongeriuslab studio, where independent projects and collaborations with the main customers are developed, including the furniture fabrics company Maharam, the interior design of the delegates’ room of the United Nations headquarters in New York, the interior cabin for the airline KLM and the installation “Color Recipe Research” following the invitation of the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist for the MAK in Vienna.
Hella Jongerius’ work combines traditional with contemporary, the latest technologies with age-old craft techniques, aiming to create products with individual character by including handcrafted elements in an industrial production process. The designer sees her work as part of an endless process, and the same is essentially true of all Jongeriuslab’s designs, which possess the power of the final stage. The unfinished, the temporary and the possible reside in the attention to imperfections, traces of the creation process and revealed potential of materials and techniques. With this working method, Jongerius not only celebrates the process value, but also involves the viewer, the user, in his investigation.
Since 2012, Jongerius has been artistic director of the Danskina carpet company and since 2007 artistic director of colors and materials for Vitra; recent projects include the publication of the book “I don’t have a favorite color” for Vitra in 2016, the “Breathing Color” exhibition on his search for color for the London Design Museum in 2017, as well as an exhibition and an accompanying publication “Beyond the new. On the Agency of Things “with Louise Schouwenberg for the Pinakothek der Moderne, Die Neue Sammlung in Munich in 2017.
Many of Jongerius’ products are found in permanent collections of important museums such as the MoMA in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam.