Designers Alexander Groves and Azusa Murakami of Studio Swine on their bubble-producing tree for COS

似乎当我会见了一个合适的lexander Groves and Azusa Murakami, the husband-and-wife duo behind Studio Swine, in New York at the end of January to discuss New Spring, their Milan Design Week installation collaboration with Swedish fashion brand COS, it was snowing. The flakes had just begun to fall, and looking out from our table at the Mercer Hotel felt like being inside a snow globe.

电影Arti内安装设置,the 1930s cinema built by Milanese architect Mario Cereghini. “We want it to be quite ephemeral,” explained Groves. “It will be there and then it disappears. It only leaves you with a memory.” When it was completed, gelatinous spheres—not unlike supersize snowflakes—dropped from the limbs of a willowy tree made of aluminium scaffolding. If you donned a pair of black gloves, you could catch one on your hand. Squeezing on it a bit would cause it to burst, revealing a puff of fog—each tiny cloud scented wood, flower, or fruit. Visitors blew at them, bumped them, and burst them against their foreheads. Some just sat and watched on one of the powder-coated steel benches also created by Swine, their perforated design a nod to the bubbles up ahead.

Studio Swine—based ostensibly in London, but, in reality, a bit more nomadic—are known for immersing themselves into captivating, anthropological research projects across the globe and somehow turning them into design. They ventured to a remote province in China to investigate the country's illustrious hair trade and ended up creating bold vases and cabinets from resin-covered hair.

Late last year, they explored Fordlandia, an industrial town in the Amazon rainforest created by Henry Ford in the 1920s to secure the rubber supply for his automobile empire. They used hardened rubber from the region for a lounge chair and floor lamp. For New Spring, though, they looked to a few different sources of inspiration. For the concept, they began with the seasons: “Our inspiration was the Japanese cherry blossom,” explained Murakami. “Each year in the spring we all gather under the same trees; we share a moment.”

Playing with atmospheric materials—water, air, and vapour—they created something of that same spirit that would be as ephemeral as a cherry blossom. As for the form, they looked to Milan's rich architectural history, making reference to hand- blown crystal chandeliers that themselves mimic bouquets of flowers.

But unlike many of the light fixtures that debuted during the design week at Euroluce on the Salone del Mobile fair grounds, these illuminated spheres only made a brief appearance. “At Milan every year it's just more and more stuff,” says Murakami. “We didn't want to add to the mass of things. We wanted to create an experience that everyone can enjoy.”

This story originally appeared inArchitectural Digest.