Ukurant Makes Space – All photos are by Maya Matsuura.
Design. Ukurant is an independent design platform and creative community with a sharp editorial eye and a commitment to giving emerging designers a genuine stage. For 3daysofdesign, it returns with Ukurant Makes Space — an intriguing gathering of 26 international voices. The exhibition is curated by founders Kasper Kyster, Josefine Krabbe, Kamma Rosa Schytte, and Lærke Ryom, and set in the striking Fabrikken for Art & Design, a former factory in the heart of Copenhagen.
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Large paper podiums serve as blank canvases for the finished pieces, sided by sketches, material tests, and process notes — offering a welcome look into the thought and labour behind each project. These are the projects that caught our eye.
Korean designer Subin Bae adds a new seat to her Wood Welding series, transposing the grammar of metal welding onto timber. Nothing is physically joined; the impression of a weld is entirely visual and conceptual — which is, of course, the point.
In the foreground, the Wood Welding chair by Subin Bae.
Lasse Sylvest Lilleør‘s Dazing Devil sun lounge could have crawled off a David Cronenberg set: glossy black ASA plastic over aluminium tubes, its form tracing the arc of a spinal column. Organic and inorganic blur convincingly, the 3D-printed surfaces toggling between exposed structural infill and vapour-smoothed skin.
Dazing Devil by Lasse Sylvest Lilleør.
Italian design duo Controforma presents Zenit, a floor lamp that makes gravitational force its operating principle. Modelled on precision instruments — clock hands, compass needles — two weights slide along the stem to bend the lamp’s curve, while eight cast-iron discs anchor the base, holding the whole thing in check as the bulb drifts through space.
Zenit by Controforma.
RUSSO BETAK‘s Snegl and Nippon lamps are printed from oysters, mussels, and scallops reclaimed from the food industry, bound in biopolymer. Shell matter brings its own pigment and its own relationship to light — among the more understated provocations in the Ukurant lineup.
Nippon lamp by RUSSO BETAK.
Swedish textile designer Siri Pettersson presents Triptych for Roma, a handwoven mural that quietly dismantles its own medium: colour gradients and tonal shifts push against the rigid geometry of the loom, producing something that weaving, strictly speaking, isn’t supposed to allow.
Triptych for Roma by Siri Pettersson.
From Montreal, Atelier Fomenta‘s Rubber Tables take elasticity seriously — rubber tablecloths stretched over cylindrical supports and fixed with rivets, where the material’s give is both the aesthetic and the structure. A clean idea, well followed through.
Rubber Tables by Atelier Fomenta.
Anton Mikkonen brings solid pine seats and a steel stool, each one arrived at through direct engagement with the material rather than a predetermined form. German designer Friedrich Gerlach closes things out with a recycled-leather stool whose shape was dictated entirely by the hide — a concise argument, and a good one to end on. Ukurant, as ever, knows how to programme a room.
Seats by Anton Mikkonen.
What Ukurant Makes Space ultimately affirms is that craft and function need not pull in opposite directions. As a launch platform for emerging designers, Ukurant continues to make the case quietly but convincingly — and this edition is no exception.
Leather stool by Friedrich Gerlach.
All photos are by Maya Matsuura, ©Ukurant.
