Stanley ruiz

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PORTRAIT: Kurt Arnold

173 Stanley RUiz 176 Tjanpi Weavers 180 Raw Edges

“ It takes more than Philippine natural materials to make an object look Filipino.”

sTANLEY RUIZ

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Filipino designer, Stanley Ruiz, discovers contemporary expression for traditional craft and materials

rans-disciplinary designer, Stanley Ruiz, thrives on contradictions. Describing himself as both an industrial designer and craftsman. The clash between machine-made and handcrafted components are evident in his New Organic collection. The collection celebrates the handmade aspect in design, while the intersection between organic material (manipulated with rudimentary tools) and precise steel forms the basis of his explorations.

The duality of being a visible industrial designer and a designermaker has given Ruiz a voice in a highly saturated design environment. In New York, he embraces mass production designing under his commercial arm Estudio Ruiz for brands such as Jonathan Adler, Indigo and Urban Outfitters. In parallel, his personal design practice could not be more incongruous. His personal projects, encounter a more sensitive artisian approach for both New York and his home-country, the Philippines.

This artisan approach is the very essence of how Ruiz began as a designer.

While playing in a punk band in the early 1990s, he developed an interest in making his own instruments with copper and brass plates. The tactility

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pulseindesign 167

words Aya Maceda photography Kurt Arnold

Above (TOP) ‘Symbiosis Set’ of speakers above ‘Pandora’ mirror collection and ‘Metro’ round baskets OPPOSITE (TOP)

‘Birdcage’ floor lamp

OPPOSITE (BELOW)

‘Raw’ clock

of creating instruments led naturally to art and design. While finishing his degree in Fine Arts (majoring in Industrial Design), Ruiz, on a non-profit basis, began developing handmade vessels and lamps with small cottage industry producers in rural towns in the Philippines, using bamboo and coconut as material. With them, he designed two collections injecting marketable potential to indigenous crafts before getting plucked overseas to design for major outfits in Bali, the UK, Japan and the United States.

After almost ten years of successfully working as an industrial designer in New York, developing objects for mass consumption, Ruiz decided to create an outlet for his personal projects while still maintaining his commercial efforts. Creating bespoke pieces and installations for exhibitions has become his platform for artistic experiments and material explorations. In 2010, he designed speakers encased in found logs and off-cut timbers for the Sounds Like exhibition curated by Joey Roth of the ICFF in New York, which he then re-developed in paper pulp cast from tree logs. He attracted a lot of attention during the 2011 New York Design Week at the Museum of Arts and Design for his live demonstration of making his Rice Chair (Epidermis Study), coating rice husk and latex over a hand-carved foam chair. Last year, Ruiz designed a pivotal installation for the Manila FAME show where he recreated an iconic Filipino ox-cart, a merchant caravan/analogue pop-up shop traditionally carrying local furniture and handicrafts from backyard businesses. The Float, as he calls his life-size steel re-interpretation of the ox cart “carried” a load full of all of his designs from the beginning of his career.

The array of Ruiz’s personal works gives new life to popular and folk iconography, drawing from objects with universal cues with context, but from the concept that context as something unique to every individual who experiences his work.

Ruiz continues to actively design in both New York and the Philippines, again developing a line of handmade vessels and lamps, but now in porcelain

cast from traditional Filipino baskets while also developing digitally routed clocks out of solid Oak with handstrapped leather, both produced with local fabricators in Brooklyn. In the Philippines, he is collaborating with like-minded, internationally trained Filipino designers in an effort to preserve the country’s heritage as artisans through working with local manufacturers on collections, there-by creating a new vibrancy in Filipino contemporary design.

The potency in Ruiz’s work stems from the symbiosis of being an industrial designer and his gravitation towards artisan processes – streamlining and handcrafting actively infecting each other to create objects drawn from memory to produce something new.

Aya Maceda is an architect and writer currently based in New York.

STANLEY RUIZ BORN Philippines LIVES New York Work as Industrial Designer Studied Fine Arts majoring

in Industrial Design

ESTABLISHED Estudio Ruiz

stanleyruiz.com estudioruiz.org indesignlive.com