{"id":1085,"date":"2026-09-22T14:23:14","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T14:23:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/?p=1085"},"modified":"2026-09-22T14:23:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T14:23:14","slug":"designing-for-the-earth-tracing-the-roots-of-bioregionalism-in-the-va-collection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/?p=1085","title":{"rendered":"Designing for the Earth: Tracing the Roots of Bioregionalism in the V&A Collection"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the Victoria and Albert Museum\u2019s Make Good<\/em> programme prepares for its sixth iteration, the milestone invites more than just a celebration of its recent success; it offers a compelling opportunity to reflect on five years of dedicated exhibitions, symposia, and strategic acquisitions. Since its inception, Make Good<\/em> has served as a vital intellectual hub, examining how design can move beyond aesthetics to address the pressing environmental challenges of our time. Central to this mission is the concept of "bioregional design"\u2014an approach that champions sustainability, circularity, and, most importantly, a deep, structural connection to the local environment.<\/p>\n

By platforming the work of innovators such as Material Cultures, Atelier Luma, and the research collective Cooking Sections, the Make Good<\/em> programme has successfully argued that the future of design lies in the local. Their contributions demonstrate that when designers look to their immediate surroundings\u2014utilizing local materials, respecting indigenous craft traditions, and addressing the specific climate needs of their geography\u2014they create objects that are not only more sustainable but more culturally resonant.<\/p>\n

Yet, "bioregioning" remains a relatively nascent term in contemporary design discourse. While it is gaining traction, it is not yet a standard lexicon used to categorize or describe the vast, historical holdings of the V&A. This realization raises a provocative question: does the museum\u2019s collection already hold the DNA of this movement? While the V&A has always been an repository for objects crafted from local materials, the intentionality behind bioregionalism\u2014the conscious effort to align production at scale with ecological responsibility and regional identity\u2014is a more nuanced narrative to trace. Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that the museum has, perhaps unknowingly, been documenting the struggle to reconcile industrial production with environmental stewardship for over a century.<\/p>\n

A short walk from the dedicated Make Good<\/em> plinth in the Dr Susan Weber Furniture Gallery, one encounters a display that encapsulates these very tensions: a collection of chairs crafted by the Orkney joiner David Kirkness between 1890 and 1900. Orkney, a rugged archipelago off the northern coast of Scotland, has long been defined by its challenging climate and scarcity of natural resources. At the beginning of the 19th century, local householders and craftspeople developed a distinctive chair design optimized for survival. These were high-backed, often hooded structures, specifically engineered to shield the sitter from the biting draughts that plagued the islands\u2019 stone dwellings.<\/p>\n

\"Bioregional<\/figure>\n

The ingenuity of these chairs lies in their materiality. With trees being a rarity on the islands, Orcadian makers turned to the land. The straw from locally grown black oats served as the primary material for the back and sides, expertly coiled and bound with cordage fashioned from local bent-grass. When structural wooden elements were required, makers did not rely on imported timber, which would have been prohibitively expensive; instead, they scavenged driftwood from the beaches. This was, in the truest sense, an exercise in circularity\u2014a design process dictated by the limits and offerings of a specific place.<\/p>\n

By the 1880s, the tradition of Orkney chair-making was on the verge of fading. It was David Kirkness who intervened, transforming a localized craft into a viable, modern business. Kirkness\u2019s innovation was to refine the informal variety of traditional designs into four standardized, marketable models. By organizing an efficient workshop that utilized local craftspeople and outworkers, he successfully scaled production, enabling him to fulfill orders not just for local Orcadians, but for customers across mainland Britain and the wider Commonwealth. This shift necessitated a change in materials; as demand grew, the supply of driftwood proved insufficient, and Kirkness began sourcing wood from Aberdeen. Despite this pragmatic compromise, the essence of the work remained deeply embedded in the Orkney identity. Today, this tradition is kept alive by contemporary makers such as Kevin Gauld, whose collaborative "Brodgar" chair with designer Gareth Neal\u2014also featured in the museum\u2014bridges the gap between 19th-century necessity and 21st-century design.<\/p>\n

The tension between global design trends and local material realities is further illustrated by a starkly different example: the short-lived but revolutionary "Mader\u00f3n" material. In 1980, Spanish chemical engineer Silio Cardona, whose family operated a funeral business in Catalonia, became increasingly concerned with the ecological cost of traditional coffin production. He found it morally and environmentally untenable that vast numbers of trees were being felled solely to be buried. His attention turned to the massive waste generated by the local almond industry\u2014roughly 300,000 tons of shells discarded annually. The resulting mounds of husks were not only a waste of resources but an eyesore that blighted the Catalan landscape.<\/p>\n

Cardona sought to engineer a "plastic wood" by blending powdered almond shells with resins. After years of experimentation, he developed a moldable, durable, and sustainable material he trademarked as Mader\u00f3n. With the enthusiastic backing of design journalist Ram\u00f3n \u00dabeda, the material gained the attention of the design world. In the early 1990s, the Barcelona-based architect Alberto Lievore utilized Mader\u00f3n for the furniture of a local bar named Rothko<\/em>. The resulting "Rothko chair" was a commercial and environmental triumph, reportedly reducing production costs by 50 percent compared to wooden prototypes. <\/p>\n

\"Bioregional<\/figure>\n

However, the trajectory of Mader\u00f3n was tragically cut short. Just as the material was garnering international attention\u2014with rumors of a collaboration with Philippe Starck circulating\u2014Cardona was killed in a road accident. Because he had not documented the precise "recipe" for the material, his invention vanished with him, serving as a cautionary tale about the fragility of individual, place-based innovations.<\/p>\n

The Rothko chair eventually found its way into the V&A\u2019s 1996 temporary display, "Green Furniture: Ecological Design." This exhibition was a seminal moment for the museum, explicitly examining the environmental consciousness of contemporary furniture production. Also featured in that display was the C3 chair by David Colwell, which offers yet another perspective on the evolution of sustainable practice. <\/p>\n

Colwell\u2019s career is a study in material evolution. His 1968 "Contour chair," created during his graduation, was heralded as a masterpiece of "Space Age" modernity. While it looked futuristic, its production was surprisingly low-tech, relying on a craft-based respect for the properties of ICI\u2019s then-newly developed material, Perspex. However, as the environmental implications of plastics became more widely understood and contested, Colwell shifted his focus. By the early 1980s, he had turned his attention to steam-bent wood, specifically ash, which is highly responsive when "green"\u2014or freshly harvested. Launched in 1982, the C3 chair utilized "thinnings"\u2014the adolescent trees removed from managed woodlands to encourage biodiversity and forest health. This principle of working with the forest’s natural cycle remains a cornerstone of the work produced by modern designers such as Sebastian Cox, a regular contributor to the Make Good<\/em> programme.<\/p>\n

This brief survey of the V&A\u2019s collection reveals two vital insights. First, the underlying principles of bioregional design\u2014an intentional, place-sensitive approach to material and production\u2014are not modern inventions; they are deeply woven into the history of craftsmanship, from the straw-bound chairs of 19th-century Orkney to the wood-bending innovations of the late 20th century. Second, the V&A has been actively acquiring and showcasing objects with ecological significance for at least three decades, signaling that the museum has long recognized the importance of the relationship between the object, its maker, and its environment.<\/p>\n

\"Bioregional<\/figure>\n

As the Make Good<\/em> programme looks toward its future, it does so from a position of institutional continuity. It is not introducing a radical new topic so much as it is illuminating an established, albeit often overlooked, tradition of sustainable, place-based design within the V&A. By continuing to draw these historical strands together, the programme ensures that the lessons of the past\u2014the circularity of the Orkney chair, the ambition of Mader\u00f3n, and the material intelligence of Colwell\u2014inform the champions of the new. In doing so, the museum reinforces its role not just as a guardian of the past, but as an active participant in the ongoing, urgent conversation about how we design for a sustainable future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the Victoria and Albert Museum\u2019s Make Good programme prepares for its sixth iteration, the milestone invites more than just a celebration of its recent success; it offers a compelling opportunity to reflect on five years of dedicated exhibitions, symposia, and strategic acquisitions. Since its inception, Make Good has served as a vital intellectual hub, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1084,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[262],"tags":[274,1641,789,275,1638,1639,126,276,903,1640],"class_list":["post-1085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asian-art-and-culture","tag-asian-art","tag-bioregionalism","tag-collection","tag-culture","tag-designing","tag-earth","tag-heritage","tag-philosophy","tag-roots","tag-tracing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}