The new tastemakers are cutlery designers
By Jessica Salter
(CNN) — The design writer and collector Dung Ngo owns more than 10,000 pieces of cutlery. It started 25 years ago, when Ngo turned 30 and decided that “the cutlery I bought after college from Target, no longer fit who I was.” He found a 40-piece set he loved in a vintage shop for $400, and spent a week searching through old design journals until he identified it: Composition, by the renowned Finnish designer Tapio Wirkkala. These days, a complete Wirkkala set can fetch upwards of $3,600.
The discovery started an obsession, with Ngo buying piece after piece of iconic cutlery from eBay and antique shops, searching for matches to grainy photographs he found in design magazines from the 1940s, 50s and 60s. “I became hooked,” he said.
That vast collection – which has to be stored out of Ngo’s New York apartment – is the basis of his new book, “Knife Fork Spoon: Modernist Cutlery 1900–2025,” due out in August. The 600-page survey of iconic flatware is accompanied by a recently-opened exhibition at the Denver Art Museum which features over 150 designs, chronologically arranged across themes like airlines, children and travel.
Both projects trace 125 years of flatware design, but, “I thought, that’s not the full story,” said Ngo, who is also editor in chief of the architecture and design journal, AUGUST. “There is also a future to this category, and maybe I can actually participate in that future in a real, physical way, rather than just writing about it.”
Ngo’s research had already pointed him toward a structural problem: modern cutlery has barely changed in 150 years. “We start the production with a flat sheet of metal, and then you bend it,” he said, adding “it can get quite three-dimensional, but never highly sculptural.”
The second problem is the craft behind that production is disappearing. Researching in Solingen, the traditional town of Germany’s cutlery makers, Ngo found that only a handful of manufacturers remained. In England, a visit to see influential designer David Mellor’s workshop near Sheffield – nicknamed the “Steel City” thanks to its heritage in steel and cutlery production during the Industrial Revolution – turned up much the same story. “It’s nearly all gone,” Ngo said. “That was heartbreaking.”
Cutting edge design
Thinking about cutlery production of the future, Ngo was inspired by a 3D-printed metal cutlery set he had included in the book, designed by the architect Greg Lynn for Alessi in 2007. At the time it was an experiment that cost $10,000 to $20,000 per set, with only a handful ever made. “I called Greg and said, ‘Can I take your design and put it back into production?’ He said, ‘Absolutely. Now is the time – twenty years later is perfect.’”
Ngo commissioned eleven other international artists to reimagine what cutlery could look like, with three important rules: make it personal, make it cultural, and design something that could only exist through 3D printing onto sintered steel (produced from compressed steel powder). He told the designers not to worry too much about function: “You can buy that stuff from anywhere for fifty bucks.” The result was the exhibition Knife, Fork, Spoon 3.0, curated by Ngo and presented by the Los Angeles gallery Marta at 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen earlier this month.
Ngo was conscious to include not only female designers (historically underrepresented in cutlery design), but also those who would use the brief to make a typical Western cutlery set more applicable to different cultures. The Korean multi-discipline designer Minjae Kim, produced a set of knife, fork and spoon – along with a set of chopsticks. While the Nigerian designer Nifemi Marcus-Bello included a bowl printed in resin along with his graphically-shaped cutlery. “He explained that in Nigeria, when you go out to eat, you’re asked if you want to eat with a fork and a spoon, or with your hands, which is the traditional way. If you say hands, you’re brought a bowl of water to clean your hands, which is part of the ritual of dining.”
Ngo singles out the Polish botanical designer and artist Marcin Rusak’s design as one he feels really pushed the brief. Rusak had spent months showing Ngo flat, organic-leaning designs before something shifted. “He called and said, ‘growing up, my grandfather was a nationally famous orchid breeder. In some ways, orchids are my first learned visual language.’” The result is a cutlery set that appears to bloom.
A fork in the road
The technology used to create these designs is significant, in part because of the sculptural freedom – such as with Rusak’s pieces – but also in its access and production. Ngo points to the ubiquity of 3D printers that use resin or plastic: “Kids have them. People print Lego parts that are missing,” he said. While 3D printers printing metal are still expensive, that will change with time, he added. “I don’t think printing metal will, within our lifetime, be something you have at home. But I think it will be easy to go to a local printer, send your design and pick it up the next day.”
When that happens, he believes cutlery design will evolve even further. He points to two categories that have historically been treated as afterthoughts in design history: children’s cutlery, and accessible cutlery for people with limited hand dexterity – both of which are covered in the book. “If you have a particular health issue where your hand does a certain thing, you could 3D print something just for that person, for that condition. Or you can reduce the size of a set for a child,” said Ngo.The cost of printing is the same per piece, regardless of quantity, “so each time you print, you can make a change to personalise the design and it doesn’t cost any more. It’s extremely important to me that both ends of our society have the same access to good design.”
What won’t disappear, he insists, even with 3D printing, is the designer. “Design will always be from us. Decisions will always be us. This is still a tool for us to use.”
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