A Modern Geppetto

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The trick to interviewing someone you’ve never met before is to do your research. Not only so that you become familiar with their work but also to see  if you can find out anything about their personality that’ll give you an indication of how the meeting could go. So when the international hotel brand, Pullman, asked me if I wanted to interview Mathieu Lehanneur and attend their Pullman Artnight party, for the unveiling of their Pullman London St Pancras Hotel’s newly designed interior, I did what any respectable writer would do. I googled him.

When his work popped up, I said, “Wow.” When his face popped up, I said, “Wow” again. To top it all off, I saw his TED Talk, and the French designer was charismatic, engaging, and humorous. I couldn’t help myself – I RSVP’d.

Arriving at Pullman Artnight was like arriving at what my ideal celebration would be like if my bank account was slightly larger and all my friends had business cards – it was the type of celebration I pretend I’m having whenever I book a tiny table for 30 people at a lounge for my birthday. For some reason, I thought that a big party at a hotel would be pretentious, and I would have to power through the night, pretending to fit into a crowd that was out of my comfort zone, so I called for back-up and asked one of my friends to come as my plus one.

When she arrived, the first thing I excitedly said was, “Can we please pretend this is my birthday party?” And that’s the thing with the Pullman London St Pancras; they’ve created a space that makes everyone feel like they’re part of their celebration and their brand. They never compromise their refinement or luxury, but rather they design it in a way that it is humane, approachable, and relatable. To everyone.

Believe me, from what I saw that night, every guest at Pullman Artnight looked like they were celebrating their own birthdays, not just me.

Pullman keeps you in awe of their hotel without ever making you feel like you’re going to be escorted from the premises if you don’t own a top hat or if you’re walking on the carpet on something other than a pair of Prada shoes. And, after all, isn’t that what hospitality is all about?

As I spoke to hotel general manager Jaime Faus, the brains behind the revamp-operation, I understood that their approach to cosmopolitanism is executed by creating architectural spaces that blend fine art, music, fashion, humour, and culture in a very modern, witty way. Take one step inside the Pullman London St Pancras, you’ll see I’m not making this up.

This finely tuned mix of elements is what makes Mathieu Lehanneur an ideal designer for Pullman’s new image. It seems that everything he touches comes to life in some unexpected, elegant way. I’m not certain you’d be able to step inside Lehanneur’s business meeting room, titled ‘Business Playground’, unless you’re actually attending a meeting, but you should definitely ask. Also, and unfortunately for you, Lehanneur won’t be inside the room to work his magic and charm you, but luckily I can tell you all about it. Having done my research and knowing that Mathieu – let’s call him Mathieu – has got a lively sense of humour, I started off by telling him, “I have to say, you are the best looking person that I’ve ever interviewed in my life.” And as expected, the interview began with a laugh.

Why do you think Pullman chose you as the person for the job?
The brief was quite open in the beginning of the project, it was summarised like this: “Do what you want, but offer the best business meeting experience that you can possibly get, in our hotels. We, Pullman, want to completely change the typical business meeting dynamic, in our rooms.” Because I’ve worked for different contexts, such as kids’ workshops at Centre Pompidou for example, they probably like my way of building a project, not only on style constraints or stylistic mood but more on my focus and interest in the way human beings feel.

Your body is linked to the brain, and if you want to make your brain very efficient and able to get great ideas, you have to work with the way people are in terms of their body and interaction with others. I designed this project exactly in that way, so not to be focused on trend, on colours, on materials – I don’t care about that! – just to refocus on the human being, at this strange moment that is the business meeting, to help people leave this room by getting a huge experience and, in a way, a souvenir.

You talk like an architect …
I hate architects!

Yet you think and design in the way architects are meant to, even if they don’t always work like that!
They start with a site plan. They go from outside to inside. Me? I go from the cells, from the neurons, from the skin, from the fingers, and I build the project around layers and after layers, based on that. Architects do the opposite way, but they never go to the cell or even to the skin, but it stops at the paint. That’s all. You are not an architect, right?

I am.

[He covers his face with hands] I’m sorry!

That’s alright! It’s interesting, a lot of the things I see in architecture magazines are very trend-based, but your work seems very humane.
I hope!

You say the meeting room offers a different kind of experience. What do you mean by that?
As I said, I built the project from the skin and the body. As an example, I’ll start with the boardroom table. The boardroom table, we transformed it into a poker table; I had this idea of mixing play and work, and I brought this idea into the room by combining these two moments, by bringing inspiration from a casino. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a casino, but the poker tables have some cushions all around the table just to get your cards in hand and feel comfortable, and just by this very simple intervention of the casino designers, it induces people to change the way they position themselves, in regards to the table.

So instead of sitting away from it, they lean in and over it. The big problem of these big meetings is that you have about 15 people present, and the attendees will be focused for about 20 minutes, and after that you take out your iPhone or Blackberry, and you sit back, pulling away from the table, and start looking at the screen. Then you become passive and out of the meeting, so my first wish was to invisibly and smoothly push people towards the table. I thought, “This is your future, this is your company; be part of the meeting.” Just by bringing the comfort not only on the backrest but also on the elbows, I hope to influence people to talk and be part of the meeting itself.

Tell me about the smaller area over there, with the green canopy.
My idea was to bring a new space that would be more informal, where some smaller/informal meetings could take place. There is no specific way to sit, you can sit on the table, you can sit on the low table, you can put your legs everywhere, you can jump onto the table – it’s built for that – and you can stand up to touch the trees projected over in the canopy. It’s up to you. I just built a kind of informal forest where you can be around this huge dome, where a video of a slowly moving forest canopy is projected.

My feeling is that even at this moment of the meeting, people will probably see something moving from the corner of their eye, even if it’s quite discreet and tiny, it’s very important to feel – even if it’s just through the corner of your eye – that something is moving, because this provides a rhythm. This is probably the key point of the project, to bring rhythm where basically there is no rhythm, because meetings are perceived as just very long meetings.

To keep your body and mind always aware you have to bring small rhythms all day long, which can be with simple actions like looking to your side, towards the canopy, or by bringing the body closer to the table. Even underneath it, your legs feel the comfort, and you can bring your knees closer to the table and feel the cushioning and have the person think, “Oh! It’s cool! It’s invisible but so cool, can I sleep there?!” [we both laugh] I always want to bring some movement, and I do this by using body movements including the eyes.

And when the lights come off, and you see that shining green light behind you, it’ll catch your attention.
Yes! And you can never switch it off.

You can’t?
No!

You’re in the forest, and if you don’t like it, too bad.
Yes, you are in the forest, so you have to deal with it [he laughs].

Your work is as diverse as it is engaging, and you’ve previously expressed that it’s rooted on the specificities and uniqueness of scientific research. I want to ask you, how did you approach the designs for the Pullman London, and what about them do you feel is particularly unique and special? Did science inform any of them, or does designing for a hotel have a different focus?
It’s not science in terms of science knowledge but rather in terms of physiology and connection between body and brain; in that way, the project is totally linked with projects I’ve made before. This idea of bringing the feeling of science, not in terms of design, but in terms of working on the body, working on the rhythm, bringing nature in a place where nature isn’t supposed to be, bringing the movement, all these things.

In this place, I use science as kind of tiny stimulations, and you know how scientist love stimuli – by electricity, vibration, electromagneticism and so on! In this project, there are stimulations that aren’t very obvious and visible but rather you discover them meeting after meeting.

When you design objects and installations, how does the final product compare to the initial conceptualisation of the piece? Do they come out as you envisioned them, do they exceed your expectations, or have they ever disappointed you?
If I show you the very first sketches of the project, we are very close to the final result of it. It was the great surprise of this project, because frankly from the beginning of the project, I was a little bit scared about the ability of such a big brand like Pullman, to be open to experiencing new things. And of course a lot of companies can say, “Yes, experiment what you want, go as far away as you can!” But after the first meeting, they’ll say “Ok that was quite fun, but go back, and please take out this and this and this, because we don’t have enough budget.”

This was totally different. It was, at the end, quite easy to work with Pullman; they acknowledged how important it was to keep the design as intact as possible. Of course, we had to deal with a budget, because this project is not supposed to be just one prototype, but it will be installed in very different hotels of the Pullman chain, so it is important to deal with money constraints, but the concept remained the same from the very beginning of the project until the end.

Experiencing hotel spaces could go one of two ways, because the guests experience that space in a very transitory manner: do you feel that the objects and spaces should reflect their social context? Or do you feel that, especially in such a multi-cultural architectural space like that of a hotel, where each guest comes from different locations, cosmopolitanism is the way to go? How does designing pieces for a hotel in London vary from designing objects in hotels in other locations?
I go back to what I said. I do not build the project on  a stylish concept that would be able to be acceptable by people in the US or Asia or Africa. No, I build the project based on the body, brain, rhythm, and this is quite the same for all the people in the world. The comfort for the elbows, for instance, is the same for you, for me, for people in Africa, so it would be stupid to bring some local approach and local style just to say, “I’m local, so I’m cool.” My intention is to get as close as I can to the people who will attend the meeting and work in the space, and the way I address this is applicable to all people and all contexts.

I want to ask you about some interesting projects you’ve completed: dB, K, and the object for the treatment for asthma. You speak about these robotic objects almost as if they were living organisms, and undoubtedly there’s something very performative about them. At what point to they become alive to you?
I always have in mind a great inspiration for me, which is Pinocchio. It comes from this beautiful but stupid toy, designed by Geppetto. One day, because of God, magic, science, who knows, he starts to come alive; when objects come alive, you do not think about technology, system, or robotics, you just feel that they become alive!

When I’m using technology or complex robotics in a project, I try to keep in mind the Pinocchio-effect, and what I mean by that is to not make a tribute to technology but to make a tribute to magic. When you talk about dB, for example, dB is full of technology! But in the end you just see and live with an object that seems to be alive, and you don’t care about what is included, like the microprocessor or the battery; you just want an object to interact with you.

With very simple technology, you can transform a stupid Pinocchio into a kind of an object with a ‘soul’. These objects are not like robots, because they don’t want to be the same as you, like the Japanese when they try to make some robot just like human beings. I try to make a living object by bringing some intelligence into it, just enough to make them appear to be alive, while also helping you. You can completely change the relationship between user and object, because with my projects you cannot decide to switch them on and off. Instead, the object is there and it lets you know, and you can do what you want, but it lets you know that it’s there for you to use it if you need help or not.

Your work is an intersection between industrial design and science. Interestingly, in the field of of architecture, technological, cyborgean innovations feel like prototypes, with no political agency, while your objects seem very alive, because they react with intentionality to the needs of the users. How do you feel about this issue in relation to architectural and spatial design?
I feel the design of the tiny object is a more powerful weapon than for big objects. It’s quite powerful and efficient to work on the magic in small stuff, because working in an object at a same scale as the human being itself puts the person in direct relationship with it. A building, for me, it’s always something that seems to be massive!

I think it’s quite easy for an insect or a virus to kill an elephant, but it is impossible for an elephant to kill a virus, so I strongly believe in the efficiency and the power of the small to transform the world. This is not accomplished by working on big stuff to show you’re powerful and wealthy; I really believe that working on the tiny, while putting enough intelligence and technology into it, can transform the world.

There’s an element of playfulness and humour in many of your pieces, and it’s fascinating that you can take serious issues, like asthma, which are informed by science, and make them into playful, lively objects that better everyday lives. How important is humour to you, as a personal process and as a design tool?
It’s very complex to work with humour. The object or the design has to be able to make you smile or give you a good feeling or mood, but I always am careful about not falling into the zone of the joke. This is very important, to make an object just on the edge of joy. If you make a joke, it will work for one minute, but imagine people who say the same joke everyday, “Okay, please shut up!” It’s very important not only to bring humour but also to bring humanity, and humanity can sometimes involve humour but other times not. It depends on the day!

by Regner Ramos