Jasper Morrison

1959 London



The industrial designer Jasper Morrison was born in London in 1959. After attending Kingston Polytechnic from 1979 until 1982, Morrison studied design the Royal College of Art. In 1984 he was given a grant to study at what was then the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. In 1986 Jasper Morrison opened a design studio in London.
It was not long before Jasper Morrison had made a name for himself as the leading exponent of the New Simplicity. His aesthetically clear and functional designs for furniture exemplify the new trend to austerity in design, notable for the fact that design is never intrusive and forms are reduced to essentials.
In 1987 Jasper Morrison designed the "Thinking Man's Chair" for Cappellini, in 1992 the "Three" sofa, and, in 1989, a "Day Bed". For Vitra Jasper Morrison designed "Ply" (1989), a chair which anticipates the anti-materialist leanings expressed in his later work. Between 1989 and 1991, Jasper Morrison designed "sofa" and "Benches", the latter as one-, two- and three-seaters.
Jasper Morrison is concerned with developing simple forms that will last, are functional and do justice to the materials used, an approach for which he has coined the term "utilism".