Shift

Introducing Shift, the latest addition to a series of upholstery textiles designed by Scholten & Baijings in collaboration with the Maharam Design Studio.

Part of Scholten & Baijings’s ongoing exploration of how color interacts with form, Shift utilizes an expansive gradient to transform a reduced grid along with any surface it upholsters. The pattern can be seen as a progression of three of Scholten & Baijings’s previous investigations of scale, grids, and dimensionality beginning with Blocks and Grid’s (2014) exaggerated approach to color blocking, followed by an investigation of color’s influence on the minimal geometry of the Bright Grid series (2015), and more recently, in the small-scale dimensionality of Mesh and Tracery (2017).

Epitomizing Scholten & Baijings’s in-depth approach, Shift was developed using hand-cut paper models to experiment with the impact of layered color to create the illusion of movement. In the pattern’s translation to a woven textile, Scholten & Baijings opted for a dimensional matelasse construction for enhanced tactility and depth. Fluid transitions within ranges of pewter, sapphire, copper, and honeysuckle mark the studio’s acute sense of color while dramatizing graphic and architectural impact.