French designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec have utilized wooden moulds to create giant versions of their diamond-shaped Ruutu vases. The vessels are named after the Finnish word for diamond, and have been originally launched by the design duo in 2014. Unlike the previous assortment, the greater constrained-edition pieces for London’s Galerie Kreo were manufactured using wooden moulds – a method that entails inflating molten glass into a wooden cast by way of a blowpipe.
This offers the rhombus-shaped vessels, produced by Finnish manufacturer Iittala, a textured surface that Ronan Bouroullec likens to “rain on a window”. “Historically Iittala develop constrained-edition pieces, and they asked us if we have been interested to do something too. We believed it’d be a great idea to produce these vases in wooden moulds, and decided to make them at a massive scale.”
“When the glass contacts the wet wooden mould, it makes the surface undulate in a specified way – it is a bit like when there’s rain on the window,” he continued.
The assortment includes 14 vases, ranging in colors and from 35 to 62 centimetres in height. Shades of amber and green differ, based on the thickness of the glass and the depth of the undulations on its surface, so no two vases are the exact same.
