Extremista #7

issue #7 spring 2014 the official extremis design, lifestyle, fun & trends newsletter

EXTREMISTA MAGAZINE

tools for togetherness

Publisher Extremis couthoflaan 20 b 8972 Poperinge www.extremis.be info@extremis.be

COLOPHON

Editorial Office Dirk Wynants Design Works watouseweg 4 8970 Poperinge www.dwdw.be bram@dwdw.be Design&Content Bram Coudijzer bram@dwdw.be

04 trend: no boundaries

Photography Alexander Popelier Arne Jennard Hilde Verbeke (demooistezwembaden.be) Joost Demuynck Piet Dekersgieter Studio DSP Studio Pointu Front page photography: Studio DSP All images, ideas, designs and design content are the intellectual property of Extremis and may not be copied, imitated or used, in whole or in part, without the prior written permission of Extremis. Š extremis 2014

06 pantagruel campaign shoot

issue #7 spring 2014 the official extremis design, lifestyle, fun & trends newsletter

EXTREMISTA MAGAZINE in this issue 08

pantagruel, gargantua’s son

20

marina unlimited

14 from hops to tremist

walrus, the first outdoor sofa

10

pantagruel in literature

work v. leisure fashion

28 24 captain’s chair for every-body

22

Contradictions only exist in people’s minds. At Extremis, we accept no limits.

TRENDWATCH: NO MORE BOUNDARIES

W

e came up with the name Extremis 20 years ago, based on a free translation of “out of the ordinary” into Latin.

“Out”, because all Extremis products are designed primarily - for use outdoors and “ordinary” because our tools for togetherness have to serve their user rather than stealing the show themselves. In 1994, the outdoor design market was still in its infancy. Design furniture was only used indoors. The introduction of this new idea of putting sustainable designs outdoors as well was a first sign on the wall: the boundary between inside and outside was blurring.

By now we can say that this imaginary boundary has almost disappeared. As is clear from our current product range and the stand at I Salone, Milano, the interior is becoming an extension of the garden. Or the other way round, if you prefer.

WORK V. PLAY Another boundary that Extremis has constantly broken through in its 20-year history is the one between work and private life. Our tools for togetherness have been very popular in both the residential and the contract market. Give your office space a homely feel, we have learned at Extremis, and now a handful of big names like Google and Apple are using our tools for togetherness to make this happen. And Google has converted the idea into concrete guidelines for its workplaces. Even more than that, Google sees workplace design as a science in itself.

AT GOOGLE’S OFFICES - excerpt from “Inside Google’s Culture of Success and Employee Happiness”

by Zach Bulygo for KISSmetrics -

Human resources, or People Operations, is a science at Google. They’re always testing to find ways to optimize their people, both in terms of happiness and performance. In fact, almost everything Google does is based on data. So it 5

should come as no surprise that Google uses all sorts of data to gauge employees and improve their productivity. Prasad Setty and his People Analytics team at Google have come up with instructions for the lunch tables, for example: If you want employees to meet each other, make the tables long. This will expose them to more people who they can get to know.

(Extremis offers tables up to 12m!)

Diner Booths v. Conference Rooms: Laszlo and his team have found that diner booths work better than conference rooms for facilitating creativity.

David Radcliffe, the man in charge of creating the perfect work environment, says that: “Casual collisions are what we try and create in the work environment. You can’t schedule innovation, you can’t schedule idea generation and so when we think up our facilities around the world we’re really looking for little opportunities for engineers or for creative people to come together.”

6

gargantua shoot with belgian waffles

gargantua & inumbra shoot with cocktails

our models Charles, Tine, Eva, Loes & Hilde

MEET PANTAGRUEL GARGANTUA’S SON

pantagruel & inumbrina shoot with belgian fries and mayonnaise

the girls at the very first extremis shoot have grown up...

a new tool, a history of campaign pictures

7

After 20 years, we have introduced a new version of Gargantua, the iconic round table with benches. Meet Pantagruel,

MEET PANTAGRUEL: GARGANTUA’S SON Gargantua’s son, named after Rabelais’ literary masterpiece.

8

T

he piece itself is once again a robust picnic table with legs also available with a powder coating and a Lazy Susan fitted into the tabletop.

So the apple has not fallen far from the tree, but Pantagruel has a completely different look and it works differently as well. Pantagruel will be introduced to the public in Milan and will be available from April 2014, exactly 20 years after Gargantua. Of course Gargantua, which heralded the beginning of Extremis in 1994 and has since become a classic, will stay in our range.

Spot the differences: update the Extremis app and compare the two in your garden!

- gargantua with inumbra parasol -

- pantagruel with inumbra parasol -

download app & try it at home

- pantagruel with optional backrest -

9

LITERATURE: RABELAIS’ GARGANTUA & PANTAGRUEL FRENCH TEXT

(ENGLISH TEXT on next pages)

Notre entreprise s’appelle Extremis et cela à juste titre. En effet nous voulons concevoir et créer des produits originaux, insolites et parfois contradictoires tout en ne reculant pas devant l’extrême. Sachons que les extrêmes se touchent et que les contradictions peuvent se concilier dans une vaste synthèse.

Telle est notre philosophie de base, telle est l’atmosphère dans l’œuvre du grand auteur François Rabelais.

10

I

l a vécu au 16ième siècle à l’époque de la Renaissance. Né à Chinon, fils d’avocat, il s’est fait moine franciscain, puis bénédictin, il a étudié le droit à Poitiers, ensuite la médecine à Montpellier, à Lyon et à Rome.

Tout en étant prêtre, une veuve lui a donné deux enfants. Bref il n’a qu’un but : connaître et vivre le plus possible. Dans sa vie, on constate la même activité et la même diversité que dans son œuvre. C’est ainsi qu’il a enseigné et exercé la médecine comme un des premiers médecins de France qui a pratiqué la dissection de cadavres pour faire progresser la connaissance du corps humain.

Lors de son séjour à l’HôtelDieu de Lyon, où il était responsable de 200 malades, il a conçu le projet d’écrire des œuvres de divertissement pour ses patients. Il s’agit d’un ensemble de cinq livres qui nous racontent les aventures d’une famille de géants.

Pourquoi des géants ? Cela facilite le succès auprès du grand public, cela permet des excès, des extrêmes et surtout cela protège l’auteur contre la censure. Car en effet, Rabelais mêle aux épisodes comiques pas mal d’idées nouvelles et dangereuses puisqu’il sympathise entre autre avec l’évangélisme (une forme de protestantisme), il critique sévèrement les abus des puissants en dénonçant les disfonctionnements de la justice, les attitudes hypocrites de l’église. Heureusement, le roi François I et la puissante famille des du Bellay ont toujours défendu Rabelais.

Quand les lecteurs sont tentés de rire superficiellement en lisant les plaisanteries grivoises et truculentes, l’auteur nous conseille « de rompre l’os et de sucer la substantifique moelle » c’est-à-dire de chercher le sens profond, le message caché.

Parlons de Gargantua, le personnage principal du roman du même nom.

“Son appétit est extraordinaire, car les vaches qu’il tète il en boit le lait et puis il les avale toutes entières”

Les premiers cris de Gargantua venant au monde éclatent au milieu d’une formidable ripaille de paysans dans la région de Chinon. Le nouveau-né, ne cria comme les autres enfants, mies, mies, mies ; mais à haute voix s’écriait : à boire, à boire, à boire, comme invitant tout le monde à boire.

Son père, le bonhomme Grandgousier décida, de commun accord avec ses convives, qu’on devait baptiser le petit avec le nom Gargantua, c’est-à-dire « Que grand tu as la gargante » (mot limousin qui veut dire gorge, gosier; 11

en espagnol garganta). Et le bébé, au seul son des pintes et flacons, entrait en extase, comme s’il goûtait les joies du paradis. Son appétit est extraordinaire, car les vaches qu’il tète il en boit le lait et puis il les avale toutes entières.

Gargantua ne se contente pas de manger et de boire excessivement, il a également une soif insatiable de connaissances universelles tout comme Rabelais luimême… Les années passent et Gargantua, marié avec Badebec, s’attend à la naissance de leur premier enfant. Celui-ci vit le jour pendant une période de grande sécheresse et c’est pourquoi son père lui imposera tel nom : Pantagruel, car « panta » en grec, veut dire « tout » et « gruel » en arabe veut dire « altéré, assoiffé ». Et en effect, plus tard, la seule présence de Pantagruel va répandre la faim, et surtout la soif parmi les étudiants de Paris. Le sel est d’ailleurs une de ses armes et il sait en user dans ses conflits avec les théologiens, les faux juges et autres hypocrites.

Rabelais est un homme qui annonce les temps modernes. Tout en rigolant, il défend la liberté de religion, l’émancipation par rapport aux contraintes médiévales, la joie de vivre et l’épanouissement de l’individu. C’est un grand optimiste qui nous invite à sa table, à la bonne chère et à la convivialité chaleureuse.

Voilà un auteur qui s’accorde parfaitement avec notre culture bourguignonne et flamande…

Extremis, Rabelais, Gargantua et son fils Pantagruel vous invitent à vous asseoir confortablement à leur table.

Our business is called Extremis, and not without reason. Our aim, after all is to dream up and create original, quirky and sometimes contradictory products, without fearing the extreme. Let’s not forget that extremes meet and contradictions can be resolved in a wider synthesis. That is our basic philosophy, and it is also at the heart of the great author François Rabelais’ work.

ENGLISH TEXT

H

e lived in the sixteenth century, during the Renaissance. Born in Chinon, the son of a lawyer, he became a Franciscan monk, then a Benedictine; he studied law in Poitiers, followed by medicine in Montpellier, Lyon and Rome. Although he was a priest, he had two children with a widow.

In short, he had a single aim: to experience and live as much as possible. In his life we find the same activity and variety as we do in his work. For example, he taught and practiced medicine as one of the first doctors in France to have dissected corpses to make progress in understanding the human body.

While working at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Lyon, where he had 200 sick people in his care, he came up with the idea of writing books to entertain his patients.

There are five books in total, which recount the adventures of a family of giants. Why giants? They helped make the books appeal to a wider audience, they behave excessively and take things to extremes and above all they protected their author from censorship. Because, let’s be clear, Rabelais slips in all kinds of new and dangerous ideas among the humorous stories: he sympathises among other things with evangelism (a form of Protestantism), he expresses fierce criticism of the abuse of power by denouncing miscarriages of justice and the hypocrisy of the church.

Fortunately, King Francis I and the

powerful du Bellay family always defended Rabelais. When readers are inclined towards superficial laughter at the books’ earthy, bawdy jokes, the author advises us to “break the bones and suck out the nourishing marrow,” that is, to seek out the deeper meaning, the hidden message.

Let’s take Gargantua, the main character in the novel of the same name.

“His appetite is extraordinary, because he drinks milk direct from cows and then swallows the animals whole” Gargantua’s first cries are heard in the middle of a huge peasant feast in the Chinon region. Instead of mewing feebly like other infants, the newborn shouted out in a loud voice: some drink, some drink, some drink, as if he were inviting everyone to have a drink.

His father Grandgousier decided, along with his drinking buddies, to christen the little boy Gargantua, which is to say “What a big gullet you’ve got” (from a Limousin dialect word meaning throat; ‘garganta’ in Spanish). And the baby goes into ecstasies at the mere sound of tankards and bottles, as if he were tasting the delights of paradise. His appetite 12

is extraordinary, because he drinks milk direct from cows and then swallows the animals whole.

It is not enough for Gargantua just to eat and drink to excess; he also has an insatiable thirst for universal knowledge, just like Rabelais himself… The years pass and Gargantua, married to Badebec, is waiting for the birth of their first child. The baby comes into the world during a severe drought, which is why his father names him Pantagruel, since “panta” is Greek for “everything” and “gruel” is Arabic for “thirsty, parched”. And indeed, later on, the mere presence of Pantagruel will spread hunger and especially thirst among the students in Paris. Incidentally, salt is one of his weapons and he makes good use of it in his conflicts with the theologians, the false judges and other hypocrites.

Rabelais is one of the heralds of the modern age. Throughout his comical stories, he defends the freedom of religion, emancipation from the constraints of mediaeval society, enjoyment of life and individual self-fulfilment. He is a great optimist who invites us to his table with good cheer and warm conviviality. Here is a writer who fits perfectly into our Burgundian and Flemish culture…

Extremis, Rabelais, Gargantua and his son Pantagruel invite you to sit comfortably at their table!

- text by Jan Duran - illustrations by Gustave DorĂŠ -

13

Extremis presents the new Tremist at I saloni: a Belgian blonde beer, now with an improved

THE TREMIST STORY, A BEER DESIGNED FOR TOGETHERNESS recipe but with the same philosophy of togetherness as the previous batch.

14

Brewer and entrepreneur Luc Vermeersch created the beer this time with local Poperinge hops, fermentation in the bottle and a deliberately low alcohol content so that you can enjoy it with your friends for as long as possible. Try it yourself: you are welcome to come and have a taste at the Extremis stand!

15

it all began in

poperinge

THE HOP SEPARATOR PICKS THE HOP FLOWERS FROM THE BINES.

SEPT 2013: THE HOP PLANTS ARE HARVESTED

dirk

luc

DESIGNER DIRK MAKES TREMIST WITH LUC THE BREWER

THE PRESSED MALT (PRESSED BUT NOT GROUND) IS MIXED WITH WARM WATER IN A TANK

De Leyte Brewery - Ruddervoorde, Belgium -

THIS MIXTURE IS BROUGHT BACK UP TO THE BOIL AND then YEAST IS ADDED AS REQUIRED

BITTERING HOPS AND AROMA HOPS ARE ADDED TO THE MIXTURE TWICE.

16

THE HOP FLOWERS DRY AT THE FARM BEFORE BEING TURNED INTO PELLETS.

BESIDES HOPS WE ALSO NEED BARLEY, OF COURSE. TREMIST CONTAINS THREE DIFFERENT TYPES.

THIS MIXTURE IS HEATED TO DIFFERENT TEMPERATURES TO DISSOLVE THE MALT INTO FERMENTABLE SUGARS.

ONCE THE BEER HAS ABSORBED THE FLAVOUR OF THE HOPS, IT IS FILTERED AGAIN AND LEFT TO SETTLE AND MATURE FOR ANOTHER THREE WEEKS

a filtering process starts. WE ONLY NEED THE STEEPED LIQUID TO MAKE BEER. HERE WE ARE DECIDING HOW LIGHT THE BEER WILL BE.

the end!

THE LAST STEP IS PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP IN THE BREWING PROCESS: TASTING. CHEERS!

17

18

19

20

21

High table with High Captain’s chairs

The new additions to the Marina range are a high table and the Marina

Desk with Captain’s rolling & swivel chairs

MARINA UNLIMITED Desk: a double table for an endlessly long office island

- one endless profile presents endless possibilities -

Desk (2 x 6 profiles) with Captain’s rolling chairs

Bistro table

download app & try it at home

Table with Captain’s sliding chairs

Marina Combi

Marina - design by fattorini+rizzini+partners

23

A daring statement, but this really is the next big thing. Since the birth of Extremis, we have been convinced that

WALRUS: THE VERY FIRST OUTDOOR SOFA the difference between indoors and outdoors will disappear. Our gardens are becoming one of our most important living spaces.

24

25

SEAT CLOSED – WEATHER RESISTANT

SEAT OPEN – ALWAYS DRY AND COMFORTABLE

CHOOSE YOUR POSITION

26

“the cosiest resting place in the garden, all year round”

T

aking the comfort of a normal sofa outdoors is far from easy, certainly in Belgium’s raw maritime climate where Extremis is at home: what about the sunlight, wind, rain, dust, splashes of dirt and fluctuating temperatures? There is not a single sofa on the market that can really stand up to meteorological mood swings. Covers are so time-consuming and they spoil the look of a beautifully designed garden. Removable cushions that you need to take indoors each time – and which are not even very comfortable – require storage space and a lot of work: for many people it is not worth the effort for half a day of sunshine. Sofa cushions that can supposedly stay outdoors without a cover look horribly dirty after just one year, and what is more they sometimes take days after a shower before they are dry enough to sit on.

Their special coatings, protective or otherwise, make the fabrics feel unpleasant to the touch. There must be another way of doing it, thought designer Dirk Wynants: the use of two materials might solve the conflicting needs for comfort and weatherproofing.

Just like its impressive mammalian namesake, the Walrus sofa defies water, wind and heavy weather. And low temperatures do not damage its robust hide. A smooth, wipe-clean exterior with a soft and comfortable inside: unzipping the Walrus sofa cushion will reveal the cosiest resting place in the garden, all year round: your seat will always be dry, and what is more it is lovely and warm in the winter. On the outside you will find an extremely hardwearing material that does not absorb water or attract dirt.

Its waterproof zips and rather corpulent shape help the water drain away fast. This keeps maintenance down to a minimum, so that once again you can be sure of getting a piece of furniture with the familiar Extremis quality and durability. Walrus saves you storage space indoors and, above all, a lot of time and effort, and it is a real tool for togetherness: Walrus makes togetherness as pleasant as can be, all year round!

This is what real innovation is all about.

27

The most comfortable bucket chair with fast water drainage & optional storage net

CAPTAIN’S CHAIR

download app & try it at home captain’s chair - design by fattorini+rizzini+partners

28

- china edition, dirk wynants studio -

“FOR EVERY-BODY”

- belgium edition, extremis headquarters -

29

captain’s chair - front view

30

captain’s chair - back view

31

extremis 3D configurator

“ drag & drop our tools for togetherness in your garden”

EXTREMIS APP FOR iPHONE & iPAD

32

extremis presents a warm welcome to “contradictions� indoor office conversation activity white old big west collective ecology global female play

outdoor home privacy relax black young small east individual economy local male work

at extremis, we accept

no limits 33

The men and women collections of this duo combine female and tough elements, simply yet edgy, with an eye for detail and

BLACK BALLOON FOR TOGETHERNESS

The theme of work v. play has inspired the Belgian design duo Black Balloon to design the new outfit for the Extremis team. It has become a clash between formal

refinement, “Nouveau Belgian Chic� as they like to call it. A total concept from top to toe!

and informal, work and relaxation.

It features a kind of kaleidoscopic print - already attracting huge interest - which, by the way, incorporates the Extremis logo...

And a dog!

34

35

extremis

(WHAT’S IN A NAME)

usser gwöhnlich extra ordinario buiten gewoon out of the ordinary außer gewöhnlich extra ordinaire 常識を超えた

extra ordinära leiwand

卓 越 ekstra ordinære ne obyčejný ‫اكسترا اوردنري‬ ylimääräinen stra ordinaria чрезвычайный