People / Prima Materia
Freddie Keen & Blake Carlson-Joshua. Prima Materia is a circular design studio that sources high-quality materials from demolition sites across London, and reimagines them into collectible furniture and interior objects. Working with materials salvaged from construction sites across the city, our studio explores how discarded architectural materials can be reimagined as refined interior objects. Each piece is locally hand-crafted and includes a Digital Product Passport tracing the material’s origin back to the site from which it was recovered. By bridging the raw materiality of the construction site with the language of contemporary design, Prima Materia creates objects that carry both material history and future value.
Adeline Lamp – Red
The design outcome was shaped around the limitations of the materials I recovered with Prima Materia from the demolition of Selkirk House at 1 Museum Street. Rather than treating the salvaged doorframes as raw timber, I designed in conjunction with their existing construction to determine the final form. The lamp’s language was built directly from the reclaimed doorframe components, repurposing the routed groove that once held the door’s rubber gasket to secure a piece of Georgian wired glass salvaged from the building’s emergency doors. Instead of machining away the traces of the material’s previous life, I made them integral to the lamp’s construction. By working with fixed profiles, dimensions and existing details the original architecture informs the new object, transforming the constraints of reuse into defining design features and preserving the building’s construction logic within the finished piece.
Montague
Using materials from a 1960s wooden staircase to make my lounge chair presented limitations, as the material was not all the same size or condition. Some pieces had old fixing holes, marks and wear that meant I had to be selective with the parts I used. The staircase also had original metal architecture and fixings with some components, such as the ends of hand rails, unique to their positioning in the building. These restrictions in the designing and making of this chair were an enjoyable challenge that gave the final outcome its individual personality.