Interview with OrtegaGuijarro
The newcomer duo OrtegaGuijarro about its Sol Side Table for ClassiCon and digital (co-)working
Carlos Guijarro and Alex Ortega stand behind the design studio OrtegaGuijarro founded in 2017 in Barcelona. The two designers now live in Barcelona and Berlin and have set themselves the goal to create individual and surprising everyday solutions with their work. The Sol Side Table was developed for ClassiCon based on this philosophy.
Tell us something about the background of Sol – how did you come up with the idea for the product?
Our work always aims to generate a visual tension. It’s easy to think that most of our new ideas start as a graphic game, where each subtle gesture generates completely different identities for the piece. Sol is the perfect example of how a small detail in a sketch can generate a design in just a moment. Sometimes you spend months just moving lines and redrawing an idea to obtain a potential new product. This didn’t happen with the Sol table. Maybe it was the beauty of it, something pure, well-balanced and synthetic, that caught our attention and made us develop a prototype to analyse the result of overlapping various glass panels. Using glass as the only material allows us to keep the pure aesthetic that fascinated us from the first moment.
Referring to the current situation: What is it like to do creative work from home? How do you stay connected, one of you in Berlin, one in Barcelona?
There is no doubt that the world has become a more polarised and uncertain place since last year, and as designers it is difficult to abstract from it. We are certain that during this time more and more consumers have become more self-aware and are leading more conscious and meaningful lives. It’s been a great opportunity to focus on ourselves and our project. Nowadays, the technology has evolved such that we do not need to have a static life, sharing time and space all the time. We have been working like this from the beginning, so it did not really affect the way we work. But it definitely changed the way we live.
Together, we decided to lift the launch of Sol to a digital level. You were the creative directors of the short film “Apex”. What does the title refer to?
In our time, when digital communication has become a must-have tool to connect with the audience due to the lack of physical interaction, we felt the necessity to be part of this new revolution. The name Apex is directly related to the latest addition to the ClassiCon collection, the Sol side table. It represents the highest point of the sun we perceive when our feet are firmly on the earth, the part of the day when we can admire the lights, shadows and reflections at their peak.
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