YOUNG TALENTS
More than just wood
You can hear Marcus Götschl's origins in his accent. The sing-song quality of his voice and his rolled R are unmistakable indicators of the designer's home region on Lake Chiemsee in Bavaria. However, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that he would choose this profession. His mother was a business economist in his grandfather's company and his father was a police officer. ‘I didn't have much contact with design,’ Götschl recalls with a smile. He adds: ‘I knew I wanted to do something manual.’ So he trained as a carpenter, working with wood and learning about the material and its properties from the ground up. He attended schools for woodworking and design in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and eventually qualified as a master craftsman. The carpentry workshop where Marcus Götschl works produces furniture and kitchens. From measuring and planning to development, manufacturing and assembly, he is involved in the entire process from the initial idea to the finished product. It's a holistic approach that has left its mark. ‘Perhaps that's where my penchant for clever designs comes from,’ says Götschl today.
As he gained experience in his craft, he developed a desire for more responsibility and to incorporate his own ideas into his designs. He travelled north in his VW bus to learn more about Scandinavian design and met Georg Guntern in Bergen, Norway. The Swiss designer runs GG Møbel there, designing and manufacturing his own pieces, and Götschl realised what a rare exception such intensive craftsmanship has become in Norway. ‘I was surprised at how much craftsmanship has disappeared there. It feels like all the craftspeople come from abroad, as fishing and the oil industry were more financially attractive a few years ago.’ And yet it is exactly the right place to experience Scandinavian design in its everyday application: the works of the Aaltos, Poul Henningsen, Børge Mogensen and Hans J. Wegner are omnipresent.
Back in Germany, Marcus Götschl spent the next few years at the Academy for Interior and Object Design in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, but his fascination with Scandinavia never left him. ‘And then I had to go to Copenhagen – there was no other option,’ he says with a laugh. A former flatmate from Bergen put him in touch with designer and cabinetmaker Anker Bak in the Danish capital – and Götschl went to Copenhagen for an internship. Working with Bak, he experienced the attention to detail that he had previously suspected in many Scandinavian designs and realised that there was ‘a kind of hype around craftsmanship in Denmark.’ Much of what he takes for granted in terms of craftsmanship is given new appreciation there, especially the intensive focus on details appropriate to the material.
After his internship, Götschl continued to work as a freelance designer for Anker Bak and became a product developer at the furniture brand ClassiCon. The combination of inspiring personalities such as Guntern and Bak, the biographies of the ‘old Danish designers’ and the daily work with designs by Eileen Gray and Konstantin Grcic at ClassiCon, ‘behind which there is so much idea and innovation,’ as Götschl says, spark a passion and thirst for knowledge that he now tries to ‘express in every new design.’
For him, it's about more than ‘just’ making things. Developing good ideas, finding innovative solutions and implementing them in a way that is appropriate to the material and craftsmanship – all this fascinates Marcus Götschl. In the ‘Norr’ lounge chair, in which he processes his impressions of Norway, conventional and traditional craftsmanship are still clearly evident. Subsequently, however, he begins to break away from this and sometimes deliberately breaks with convention. The ‘Tension’ stool combines gentle curves and precise joints with reduced material thicknesses in the seat, which becomes flexible and gains its stability through pressure and tensile stress. In both designs, the joy of the material and the desire to create something new are palpable, contributing to their creation.
The ‘NaKu’ shelf, developed in collaboration with the furniture brand Zeitraum, is more complex. It consists of two modules that can be stacked or arranged in various ways – as individual objects or as an entire shelving unit. Marcus Götschl's aim here was to reduce the consumption of solid wood to a minimum: very thin solid wood surfaces are stabilised by ‘leaf veins’. ‘It's like holding two spaghetti strands against a sheet of A4 paper,’ explains Götschl. The ‘NEW GEN’ bed, whose individual parts are joined with simple plug connections, also follows this logic: the connection stiffens the system in all three dimensions, creating a stable base for the mattress that is both a functional slatted frame and an aesthetic framework. The designer says: ‘Rethinking everyday objects and questioning whether designs that are decades or even centuries old are still state of the art – is a slatted frame really still necessary today with all the high-performance foams available?’ Here, too, he works with minimal material thicknesses, which are inserted into the construction in a curved state.
A current project with FÓLK Reykjavik, a company originally from Iceland and now based in Copenhagen, shows that he has long since thought beyond the materials of his training profession: Together, they are launching Götschl's first piece of furniture – a side table collection made of folded perforated sheet metal, assembled into cubes and available in various colours and sizes. ‘The design was originally created from waste and leftover pieces from the air conditioning industry,’ says Götschl. Such considerations – arising against the backdrop of current sustainability discussions – are driving the designer, who currently rents office space in an old industrial hall in Munich's design league.
Although he does not believe that our problems can be solved by new products alone, Marcus Götschl says that ‘something can definitely be achieved by changing consumer behaviour’. For him, design becomes relevant when it can justify its own consumption of resources. ‘We simply have a limited amount of resources at our disposal – and what's more, they are distributed unfairly around the world.’ And so he says: "The so-called throwaway culture is already on the decline in some areas, but we often live in our own bubble. From a social perspective, I believe there is still a lot of room for improvement.‘ Against the backdrop of his origins and the influence of his craft training, he emphasises: ’Timeless, durable and affordable products can play an important role in giving people the opportunity to question and change their consumption behaviour."
