THE GLASS AS STRUCTURE RATHER THAN AS SURFACE in ZODIAC & SPHERA
What makes a mirror worth more than a decade of a designer’s attention is how little it asks. ‘A mirror is an object whose function is reduced to its absolute minimum,’ Fastrez says. ‘As long as something has a reflective surface, it can essentially be considered a mirror.’ Hung on a wall it carries nobody’s weight and resists nothing, so it never faces the structural tests a chair or a table has to pass, and what remains is a single geometric demand, which is that it stay more or less flat.
He treats that as a paradox rather than a gift, one severe constraint in a single direction and almost total freedom in every other, and says constraints are what he finds stimulating in the first place. By his own account it is probably the object that leaves him the most room to work somewhere between design and sculpture, and the one most willing to carry a story.
Orbit mirror from the Sphera collection
Both of these pieces then do something that reverses what a mirror usually is, which is to use the glass as structure rather than as surface. Zodiac’s ceramic frame is half a ring, built from two moulded sections, and where the ceramic stops the reflection continues, so what the eye reads as two inflated tubes floating one above the other is a single tube and its image. ‘The reflection becomes an essential part of the object’s construction,’ Fastrez says, and in doing that work the mirror very nearly disappears. Sphera relies on the glass just as literally, since without the rigidity of a sheet of mirror the fixing system has nothing to hold and nothing to hold it. ‘With Sphera, the object is visually made of nothing but chrome and reflections,’ he says. ‘Its appearance depends entirely on its surroundings, which are reflected faithfully in the flat mirror and distorted across the chrome spheres.’
detail of Crystal Palace
ORNAMENT AS FUNCTION IN ITS OWN RIGHT
‘I’m very interested in the idea of taking something as ordinary as a piece of hardware and reworking it until it becomes the strongest aesthetic feature of a project,’ Fastrez says. Both pieces end as arguments about ornament, and he makes the argument himself rather than leaving it to be inferred. ‘Ornament is something I actively pursue in my work as a designer, but I find it particularly interesting when it isn’t simply added to an object, but becomes part of its construction or the way it functions,’ he explains, and he describes that as possibly the most interesting form design can take, an object acquiring a sculptural character directly out of the logic that produced it. Sphera, by his account, began at the moment he realized that emphasising the small functional elements would generate ornament without costing the original system any of its functionalism.
The second half of the argument is about the word function itself. ‘I also think our definition of an object’s function is often far too restrictive,’ he notes. ‘An object never serves just one purpose. A mirror’s primary function might seem to be reflecting an image, but to me that’s a very incomplete definition. A mirror also serves to decorate an interior, to give it character, to place a space within a particular period, style or narrative.’ He then goes further than most designers would be willing to, and says that this ornamental function can be as important as the reflective one and is sometimes more so.
Crystal Palace in large, vertical format
That produces a reversal of the sentence design students have been handed since Louis Sullivan wrote it in 1896, and of the century of suspicion toward ornament that followed. ‘If we accept ornament as a function in its own right,’ Fastrez says, ‘Zodiac and Sphera are, in their own way, functionalist objects whose form also follows their ornamental function.’ Zodiac arrives there through the relationship between a frame and its reflection, Sphera through the repetition of a fitting that spent fifty years being hidden, and in both cases the decoration is not sitting on the object but holding it up.
small Zodiac Bumper mirror in green
detail of the Zodiac Bumper mirror