Since the 1980s, Fernando and Humberto Campana have used locally available materials and traditional techniques in their desire to create a distinctly Brazilian language of design. The brothers grew up in an agrarian community near São Paulo, and the dualities of nature and urban life, and handmade craft and industrial technology, have become hallmarks of their designs. Over the past forty years, they have built a practice that encompasses limited-edition pieces made in their studio as well as mass-produced works in collaboration with major international manufacturers.

 

For the Campanas, each design begins with a material. According to Humberto, “There is a kind of flirtation with the material. . . . We try to see its possibilities and its limitations, then we start to work with it.”¹ Once a form is built by hand and agreed upon, they document its production. The role of the hand is essential to understanding their ethos and designs. Even if a work is produced by a manufacturer, the handmade aesthetic and the randomness and imperfections that come along with it are strongly valued by the designers. A second, and equally important, tenet of the brothers’ designs is their commitment to the environment. Their designs reflect the vibrancy and chaos of the streets and communities of São Paulo as well as elements from rural Brazil, taking into account environmental and sustainability concerns while preserving heritage.

 

In 1991 the Campanas designed what would become one of their most well-known designs, the Favela chair. Inspired by São Paulo’s “haphazard and erratic architectural expansion” as well as the Brazilian practice of gambiarra—an inventive and low-cost approach to creating necessary objects or structures—the Favela was originally constructed from wood scraps scavenged from fruit crates.² Fernando has explained that it is inexorably linked to the aesthetics and construction methods of the favela homes built by São Paulo’s poor: “People in the favelas fill up the space around them with wood and plastic without any obvious rational thinking—their building method is very intuitive. I tried to emulate their behavior in order to make the chair.”³

 

The Campanas originally made two Favela chairs, each with sharply angled sides and larger pieces of wood for the seat, back, and legs. Specific areas were layered with smaller pieces of wood in a collaged manner. The overall effect is one of spontaneity rather than deliberation. By the time the chair was put into production by the Italian firm Edra in 2003 and debuted that year at the Salone de Mobile in Milan, its design had evolved into a more rectilinear form. Every part of its structure was covered with small slats of wood in a pattern more akin to a puzzle than a collage. While each chair is still made by hand and therefore has some irregularity, the visual effect is more static than its predecessor. This may be, in part, due to the machine-made base layer of wood that provides stability to the form. —Cindi Strauss