"It's more than a great pride, for all the symbolism of the idea," says Athime de Crécy, 27. This young designer has been self-employed since last year, after graduating from ECAL in Switzerland and spending five years working for the famous Philippe Starck.
Athime de Crécy imagined a wireless, rechargeable desk lamp, "made of a long tube topped by a small mirror whose surface was calculated by Swiss engineers to reflect a light that is constant over a large area at an angle". This lamp seduced the jury, which decided to include it in the institution's collections.
"In desk lamp typologies, you often have lots of springs, connections, an assembly that has to be meticulous. Here, the idea is to have an elementary object, with as few components as possible. These are experiments with which the lighting industry would be more cautious, in my opinion, because the typology is quite different from what can exist in the catalogs. That the Mobilier National can give an echo to these kinds of creations, for me, it's a great tool."
He deplores the fact that design today resonates with an "aesthetic of merchandise, a subcategory of advertising. Design is a discipline that was invented by true revolutionaries, William Morris or Charlotte Perriand, who made murals in odes to the Popular Front. When you see the whole Bauhaus school, which really had the ambition to change society, by bringing art to the masses... Recovering this link with the common good, the public good, is something that speaks to me a lot."
His conception of design is "that we are here to make, with less material, the most intelligent things possible, the most useful, the most beautiful, the most functional, both symbolically and in use. We really want to use the best and most economical processes, which, in my opinion, will come back to the center of the game with environmental issues. We have our role to play in that, as designers."