Born in the Spandau area of Berlin in 1968 JERSZY SEYMOUR (1968-) is a product and furniture designer whose work combines a raunchy humour with innovative use of materials. Born in Berlin, Seymour grew up mostly in London, but has lived and worked in Milan since 1999. When the guests arrived at a party thrown by Sputnik, the Japanese design collective, in a disused garage on via Meda during the Milan Furniture Fair, they discovered Bonnie and Clyde, a life-size polyurethane foam replica of a 1985 Ford Escort Coupe, in the middle of the space and animated images of copulating cockroaches projected on to the walls. Both the car and cartoon cockroaches were the work of Jerszy Seymour, the Berlin-born, London-educated, Milan-based industrial designer. "Dear Teruo, This is an idea for a project for Milan, which excites me, it is a way of mixing and scratching culture," he had emailed Teruo Kurosaki, the Japanese entrepreneur who founded Sputnik. "…Bonnie and Clyde’s car. A real car cast in building polyurethane, hollowed where the inside can be used as a sofa, bed (it is like an old four-poster bed), chilling out place or eating place." Even the Bonnie and Clyde sofa is an example of material reinvention: its expanded polyurethane foam is usually used in the construction industry. "A car already has human dimensions," continued Seymour’s email to Teruo Kurosaki of Sputnik. "Put inside, it creates a connection between architecture and furniture. It responds to the fact that more people want to live in open ex-industrial spaces like a kind of way of being compatible with spaces not meant for living or creating spaces in huge modern restaurants not meant to be impersonal. The car is a romantic symbol of freedom and, maybe now, true luxury is freedom."
