klaas kuiken: bottles

‘bottles’ by klaas kuiken image © designboom

as a means of exploring how mass production could potentially be individualized, ‘bottles’ by dutch designer klaas kuiken, shown atimm cologne 2011, uses the archetypal green bottle to develop new forms and shapes, in which he blows them each piece one by one into unique objects.

when analyzing the mass-produced glass bottles, kuiken noticed that there were different thicknesses of glass. as a means of emphasizing those differences, he designed a special technique, as well as a self-developed glass oven, in which to ‘blow-up’ the existing bottles. by doing so, the result are a series of vessels with the presence of glass bulges more in places where the thickness of the walls is thinner and less at places where the glass is seemingly thicker.

experimenting with heat and pressure controls, and of course not without a lot of explosions and cracked bottles, kuiken utilized the technique to create a large family of individual, ‘mass-produced’, green bottles.

varying thicknesses in glass results in bulges in more places than in others image © designboom

‘bottles’ and their differen forms image © designboom

‘bottles’ display at imm cologne 2011 image © designboom

images courtesy of klass kuiken

images courtesy of klass kuiken

images courtesy of klass kuiken