DesignerGerman
Konstantin Grcic
2 active items
Konstantin Grcic grew up in Wuppertal and Munich, where his father - born in Belgrade - collected 18th-century antiques and his mother worked as an art dealer. That early immersion in objects shaped across centuries fed directly into a practice that treats every design problem as a question about structure, weight, and use. He trained first as a cabinetmaker at the John Makepeace School for Craftsmen in Wood at Parnham House in Dorset (from 1985), learning joinery at the bench before studying Industrial Design at the Royal College of Art in London, graduating in 1990.
After a brief period as studio assistant to Jasper Morrison, Grcic established Konstantin Grcic Industrial Design (KGID) in Munich in 1991. His early projects for SCP in London - the 1995 Refolo trolley, the 1997 Wanda dish rack - were compact, carefully resolved exercises in how everyday objects could carry formal intelligence without announcing it. The 1999 Mayday lamp for Flos changed the conversation: a polyamide construction-site lamp adapted for domestic use, it won the Compasso d'Oro in 2001 and entered the permanent collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
Chair One, launched by Magis in 2004 after four years of intensive engineering development, is perhaps the piece most closely associated with his name. Its seat shell - cast as a single piece of die-cast aluminium using a tool of exceptional complexity - translates the geometry of a geodesic network into a stable, stackable chair. The form is uncompromising to the point of looking uncomfortable, yet the ergonomics work. It is held in collections at MoMA in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and major design museums across Europe. His Myto chair for Plank (2008), which exploited the cantilever potential of BASF's Ultradur High Speed plastic in a structurally intricate single-shell form, won the Compasso d'Oro again in 2011. A third Compasso d'Oro followed in 2016 for the OK lamp for Flos.
Beyond the production pieces, Grcic has developed installations and research projects that interrogate how environments are used. Solo exhibitions at Haus der Kunst in Munich (2006), the Art Institute of Chicago (2009), the Vitra Design Museum (2014), and Neue Sammlung in Munich (2015) have treated his work as a subject for cultural analysis rather than only commercial display. From 2020 to 2024 he held a professorship at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (HFBK), and the Royal Society of Arts appointed him Honorary Royal Designer for Industry in 2009.
On the Nordic secondary market, Grcic's work appears across Stockholm Auktionsverk (the most active house for his pieces), Auktionshuset Kolonn, and Formstad Auktioner, totalling 21 lots. The Miura barstool for Plank, the Spike wall shelf for Magis in marble, and the Traffic armchair appear most frequently. Top sale is 6,500 SEK for a Traffic armchair. Spike shelves have traded between 850 and 1,980 EUR, reflecting solid secondary-market demand for the more compact, easily shippable pieces in his catalogue.