Search

Philippe Starck (1949)

"Subversive, ethical, ecological, political, humorous… this is how I see my duty as a designer.” Philippe Starck

Inventor, creator, architect, designer, artistic director, Philippe Starck is the author of unconventional projects that hold fertile surprises.

From everyday products such as furniture and lemon squeezers, to revolutionary mega-yachts, intensely vibrant, stimulating and ghostly hotels and the miraculous technologies of individual wind turbines and the electric car, he constantly pushes the boundaries and criteria of contemporary design.

Philippe Starck has a mission, a vision: that creation, whatever its form, should improve the lives of as many people as possible. Starck strongly believes that this poetic and political, rebellious and benevolent, pragmatic and subversive duty should be shared by everyone. He sums it up with the humor that has distinguished him from the start: "No one has to be a genius, but everyone has to participate."

"My father was an aeronautical engineer. For me, that made invention a duty." Philippe Starck

He was an indifferent student at the Nissim de Camondo School in Paris, but in 1969 Starck designed an inflatable structure based on the idea of materiality, reflecting his initial interest in living spaces.  This revelation earned him his first success at the Salon de l'Enfance. Shortly afterwards, Pierre Cardin, seduced by his iconoclastic design, offered him the position of artistic director of his publishing house.

In 1976, after creating several emblematic objects, including a floating lamp and a portable neon sign, this intrepid dreamer designed an audacious decoration for the La Main Bleue nightclub in Montreuil, demonstrating that no venue is less respectable than another simply because of its eccentricity. He then completed the legendary Parisian nightclub Les Bains Douches and the Starck Club in Dallas.

At the same time, he founded his first industrial design company, Starck Product, which was later renamed Ubik after the famous Philip K. Dick novel. Here he began collaborating with the biggest design manufacturers: Driade, Alessi, Kartell, Drimmer, Vitra in Switzerland and Disform, among others.

In 1983, Philippe Starck was discovered by the general public when, on the advice of Culture Minister Jack Lang, President François Mitterrand chose his design to decorate the private residence of the Elysée Palace. This symbolized an institutional recognition of design. The following year, his international fame was confirmed thanks to the success of Café Costes, a new venue that was both functional and elegant, which contained all the essence of Starck's architecture and which converged with the birth and flourishing of a community. His reinvention of the codes of the Parisian café turned it into the café par excellence.