Brecht Duijf and Lenneke Langenhuijsen aka buroBELÉN are very happy as they have just invented the name “materializers” to describe their profession. After all, it’s not exactly easy to describe what they two do. They’re not “just” textile designers, although many of their projects hinge on fabrics, for example when the two Design Academy Eindhoven graduates stain velvet with indigo or make textiles from wood in keeping with a crafts tradition that originated on the South Pacific island of Tonga. That’s from where the materializers import the fabrics made from the outer bark of mulberry trees; they have it refined in St. Gallen in Switzerland. Most recently, buroBELÉN caused a real stir with their unusual “Atmospheric Car” study for Volvo – at the last Dutch Design Week. It’s an automobile that they want to produce using an almost dematerialized material called “Airloy”.