A quintessential voice in contemporary Belgian design, Maarten Van Severen gained attention soon after opening his studio in 1986 and remained a dominant figure until his tragic death from cancer at the age of forty-eight in 2005. The great-grandson of a blacksmith, and the son of an abstract painter, Van Severen departed from architecture study at Ghent’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts before earning his degree. Perhaps as a result, he dismissed the title of designer and often preferred “creator” to summarize his role moving between architecture, interiors, studio production, and furniture prototypes bound for industrial manufacture.¹ Van Severen expressly aimed for his forms to live in the world “as if they were always there.”² Thus, his pieces are imbued with a radical simplicity often categorized as minimalist—a prevailing architectural approach espoused by architects and designers such as John Pawson and Jasper Morrison. On the contrary, Van Severen rejected this designation, situating his minimal designs as the result of maximum effort.³ This same rigor led to his success with leading design firms, including Vitra, Alessi, and Kartell, the Milan-based manufacturer known for pioneering plastic furnishings including LCP00 (Low Chair Plastic 2000).

Sharp angles often dominate Van Severen’s designs, which would have made LCP00’s lithe curves a sculptural anomaly, were it not for his related chair, LC95A, designed from 1993 to 1995. The earlier design is fashioned from a long aluminum sheet folded back onto itself; LCP00 is its natural evolution into industrial manufacture. As a result of Kartell’s production, the chair is also a technological feat. It is molded from a sheet of polymethacrylate (PMMA) plastic, making its looped form sheer, strong, and shatterproof. Low slung and free from legs, the interior and exterior are equally visible. Preparatory sketches reveal the technical achievement of its metal suspension, resulting in the chair’s balance of bounce and stability.⁴

While LCP00 is Van Severen’s most significant design in plastic, he employed the material throughout his career, notably in the interiors of Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas’s renowned Villa Lemoine (1997–99). Plexiglass made up the bathroom countertop and integrated sink, a nearly invisible milled depression. In 1999, the same year as Villa Lemoine’s completion, Kartell produced the first polycarbonate chair, declaring transparency as the firm’s new driving force.⁵ Van Severen’s LCP00 debuted just two years later. In this yellow example—one of four colors offered—the edges turn nearly neon, spotlighting its pure line. The following year, Kartell debuted Philippe Starck’s Louis Ghost Chair. Both designs confirm plastic’s reinvention at the turn of the twenty-first century, ushering in its new role in high-tech, high-style industrial design.⁶ —Elizabeth Essner