Ross Lovegrove

Ross Lovegrove is a designer and visionary whose work has helped reshape how we think about form in the three-dimensional world. Born in Cardiff, Wales, in 1958, he studied industrial design at Manchester Polytechnic before completing his master’s at the Royal College of Art in London. His early career took him to frog design in Germany, where he worked on projects for Sony and Apple, and then to Paris with Knoll International. There he joined the Atelier de Nîmes alongside Jean Nouvel and Philippe Starck. He returned to London to found his own studio in 1990.

Lovegrove draws on the logic and beauty of nature. His designs bring together technology, materials science and intelligent organic form in an approach he calls “organic essentialism”, which many see as a defining aesthetic of the 21st century. His work has an optimistic, deeply human character and spans an extraordinary range of scales, from cameras, furniture and bottled water to cars, trains, aircraft interiors and architecture. Clients have included Airbus, Japan Airlines, Peugeot, Issey Miyake, Kartell and Moroso. His work is held in the permanent collections of museums such as MoMA in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and it is the subject of the Phaidon monograph Supernatural.

His collaboration with Artemide has produced some of the brand’s most sculptural pieces. Mercury, available as a pendant or ceiling light, is a fluid cluster of polished, liquid-like forms that reflect light by night and act as a sculptural object by day. The Cosmic collection followed in 2009. Its centrepiece, Cosmic Leaf, is a scaled, leaf-like form designed to capture and hold light rather than simply emit it, much as a planet catches the light of a distant sun.

Learn more