Adrien De Melo: Upside Down

Edited by Galerie BSL, and a special commission from the Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Upside Down by the young French designer Adrien De Melo is a landscape of suspended books, like a music score. A paradoxical bookcase which comes and defies the laws of gravity to tailor storage codes. Its main asset: a levitating modular architecture, with a technically simple appearance, seeking transparency, articulated around five floating modules adapted to all book sizes. UPSIDE DOWN thereby structures a new object-book relationship with space, whilst at the same time proposing a progressive and inventive bookcase, adapted to contemporary lifestyles.

Comparable to notes in a scale, the five base modules allow your own ideal bookcase to be constructed to your taste. 'Books are slightly intimidating desirable objects. The very discrete Upside Down exposes them and makes them fully accessible,' Adrien De Melo emphasizes. The floating design of the stainless steel frames covered with translucent polyurethane inflated cushions pay tribute both to the artisanal know-how -stitching-welding of the elastomer – and to the industrial labour – laser cutting and mechanical assembly. A progressive bookcase just like our reading, Upside Down can be reinvented with use. Suspended by straps, the modules are therefore reorganised or even enriched according to individual needs and according to changing desires.

Edited by Galerie BSL to 8 examples + 1 prototype, UPSIDE DOWN is, originally, a commission from Louis Vuitton Malletier to equip the Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton (60 rue Bassano Paris 8th) where it will be definitively installed from February 2011.

Born in Nanterre (France) in 1979, Adrien De Melo, a graduate of the Paris 8 and Paris 1 Sorbonne universities, has worked as a self-employed designer in Paris since 2006. Scenographer for the Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton (2010), creator of furniture for the 104 (2008) and the communications agency Tilder (2009), he envisages design like integrated, non-standardised architecture, where the elements of the manufacturing process are exposed and promoted. It is a conceptual approach which results directly from a rich experience as principle contractor and management of technical production in contemporary art. Therefore, he trained as an architect at Périphériques Architectes and GPAA. In 2007-2010, he led the conversion of an industrial wasteland (12000 m2) into a gallery for the internationally renowned Italian Galleria Continua – the construction of exhibition areas, office design – and for three years has carried out the production of exhibitions and works by artists like Subodh Gupta, Daniel Buren, Mona Hatoum, Loris Cecchini, Michelangelo Pistoletto or Kendell Geers at Continua-Le Moulin (France). In 2006, within the agency Art Public Contemporain, he led the technical production of nine micro-architectures for 'The artistic accompaniment for the Tramway des Maréchaux Sud' conceived notably by Frank O. Gehry, Dan Graham, Sophie Calle, Didier Fiuza Faustino, Peter Kogler and Daniel Buren.