RDAI and Creative Matters Weave a Six Rug Collection From Microscopic Nature
French architecture studio RDAI has worked with Canadian rug maker Creative Matters on Zoometry, a six piece collection of hand knotted rugs drawn from the microscopic structures of butterflies, spiders and birds, on view in Paris through September 23.
Paris studio RDAI, led by Denis Montel and Julia Capp, has stepped outside its usual architecture and retail interiors work to design a collection of rugs with Creative Matters, the Canadian manufacturer known for hand knotted pieces. Called Zoometry, the six rug series launched during Maison and Objet season and is on view at Galerie Mouvements Modernes in Paris until September 23, as first reported by Wallpaper*.
The starting point was not decorative but structural. RDAI interior architect Johan Thuillot said the team wanted to work from the underlying geometry of living things rather than illustrate them literally, explaining "the idea was not to design a carpet with a bird on it." The studio instead modelled the microscopic patterns found in butterfly wings, spiderwebs and bird anatomy using Grasshopper, a parametric design tool more commonly associated with architecture than textiles, over a development process that ran nearly two years.
Turning those digital patterns into rugs meant translating precise, computer generated geometry into a slow, entirely manual craft. Each piece is knotted from Tibetan wool and Chinese silk using a traditional Tibetan technique, with three to four artisans working on a single rug at a time. At roughly three by two metres and 35 kilograms each, the rugs contain around 1.8 million knots apiece, with artisans completing about seven centimetres, or 400 knots, in a single day.
Textile artists Anna Panosyan and Clemence Hardelay worked alongside RDAI to refine the six designs, which include pieces named Butterfly 02, Butterfly 03 and Coral. Rather than crowding each rug with detail, the team pared the patterns back to a handful of forms scaled up to fill the full field of the rug, treating restraint as the more difficult design problem to solve than ornamentation. Panosyan has described the resulting pieces as heirlooms rather than seasonal objects, the kind of rug meant to outlast a single interior scheme or design cycle and move between homes across generations.
Zoometry sits at the intersection of two industries that rarely meet directly, an architecture studio and a rug manufacturer working from the same software used to model buildings. It also marks a rare instance of a Maison and Objet season collaboration built entirely around a gallery show rather than a trade fair stand, giving the six rugs a slower, more contemplative setting than the usual showroom crush. The collection remains on view at Mouvements Modernes, with the six rugs presented as a set through the remainder of Paris's autumn design season.
