Eric Jourdan, Sliding pieces/crossing structure

Posted on April 8, 2008
Filed Under designer + portraits, architecture, furniture |

Extending the ‘Stem’ furniture collection for Cinna and with a permanent urban structure standing on-site in front of Saint-Etienne terminus, Eric Jourdan has kicked into 2008 with two fine illustrations of his elegant and limpid design vocabulary.


‘Stem’ for Cinna
The clean lines and basic forms of these tables and storage units appeared in 2007. Jourdan describes them as being ‘Silent as a yacht’s shell cutting water stem to stern’

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Urban structure, Saint-Etienne station
Jourdan fans and connoisseurs will see in this fence-gate structure a logical follow-on to the designer’s experiments in furniture-architecture, in particular the ‘Traversants’ set shown at the Peyroulet gallery in the year 2000: a series of free-standing partition pieces to mark separation in space as well as passage to another room.


It is a large openwork screen that fills two functions: channel and admit. Commenting on it, Jourdan says: ‘The structure is there without being there: people have to be able to pass thru it and also feel its presence wherever they happen to be on the train station forecourt. There is also a reference to modernism in the definition of an open plan space, in the spirit of Mies van der Rohe’.

Client : City of Saint-Etienne (France)

Eric Jourdan, designer, graduated from the School of Fine Arts of Saint-Etienne in ’87 and from Arts déco in Paris in ‘89. After working under Philippe Starck with Tim Thom, the design arm of Thomson electronics, he began collaborating with big-name French furniture makers like Roset, Cinna and Domeau & Perès. An adept of economy in signs, he is by no means a minimalist. Besides a solo show at the Peyroulet gallery in Paris, he was awarded a VIA Carte blanche grant in 2002.

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