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Drywall rail is a cold-formed steel channel profile, a mass-produced item designed to hide behind plaster and paint, performing its structural duties in the dark. Its design is purely technical, a precisely designed part that no one has to see, yet Claudio Larcher and Sofia D’Andrea they have brought it to the living room.
THE Plasterboard collection uses these standard profiles as a new material vocabulary for a range of furniture and home decor items, crafted with minimal modifications. The project belongs to the practice of working with standardized components, making something new from what already exists and letting the origin of the material remain legible in the finished object. From the Dadaist challenges of Marcel Duchamp to the DIY culture of IKEA, the question is the same: how much transformation is required before we can claim to have made something new?
Plasterboard collection by Claudio Larcher and Sofia D’Andrea © Edoardo Oggioni
Plasterboard collection by Claudio Larcher and Sofia D’Andrea © Edoardo Oggioni
Plasterboard collection by Claudio Larcher and Sofia D’Andrea © Edoardo Oggioni
Plasterboard collection by Claudio Larcher and Sofia D’Andrea © Edoardo Oggioni
Claudio Larcher and Sofia D’Andrea © Edoardo Oggioni
We spoke to Claudio Larcher and Sofia D’Andrea about the project’s origins, its architectural references and material memory.
How did you first encounter drywall guides as a design material? Was there a specific moment when you realized their potential?
Claudio Larcher:
“In the past years, we had the opportunity to visit many construction sites related to architecture and interior design, and that’s where our curiosity about certain building materials began. We were particularly interested in the color of plasterboards, their technical shape and above all the amount of waste generated during construction. We no longer saw them as simple hidden structural elements, but as possible personal design elements with their own elements.
The architectural language they carry remains very present even when we transformed them into objects of furniture: it is as if they retain a kind of constructive memory, even as they change function and scale.”
There is a long history behind designers working with materials or standardized components. Is there a particular project that has inspired you to create the Drywall collection?
Claudio Larcher:
“A very important reference for us was Enzo Mari’s Putrella, produced by Danese, an industrial element reinterpreted through a very minimalist gesture, but with a strong conceptual meaning. If we look at the architectural scale, the Center Pompidou by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers is a decisive inspiration. The thought strongly influenced the Drywall collection, encouraging us to make visible what usually remains behind the scenes.”
The architectural reference invoked by the designers is indicative. the Center Pompidou is a building turned inside out, its structural systems, ventilation ducts, escalators, all moved outside, color-coded and celebrated rather than hidden. The technical skeleton of the building became its identity. The Pompidou is often read as a playful provocation, but it was also a serious architectural argument for the honesty of the medium, that the logic of construction has its own beauty. In the same way, Drywall brings one of the internal organs of construction into the living room and asks us to find it beautiful.
A recurring theme behind the practice of designing with standard industrial components is that designs can ultimately be replicated by the public, without having to rely on custom production. Is that something you thought about during your process?
Sophia D’Andrea:
“For us, the work is above all a creative gesture and a personal vision of the world and the objects that inhabit it. The plasterboard collection was not designed with the intention of being an open or easily reproduced system, but rather as a critical reflection on the material and its expressive potential. However, we know that it can usually inspire other design materials. from a different perspective.”
In this sense, the work is less about design than about attention, the act of looking closely at the world as it is, rather than as we have been taught to see it. Claudio Larcher and Sofia D’Andrea suggest that there is meaning, beauty, and creative potential in materials that surround us and that we have learned not to notice.
