BarberOsgerby is a furniture and industrial design studio established in 1996 by British designers Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby.
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Edward Barber was born in Shrewsbury, England and studied interior design at Leeds Polytechnic. Jay Osgerby, from Oxford, completed a foundation art programme at Oxford Brookes University and studied product design at Ravensbourne College of Art and Design of Art in London. They met while studying a postgraduate course in Architecture at the Royal College of Art. At the RCA their collaboration in design projects started through their friendship and soon developed into a work relationship. After graduating from the RCA they set up a studio at the Trellick Tower in West London. It was here that they first designed the Loop Table, which was first manufactured by Isokon. It was show-cased at the Milan Furniture Fair in 1996 and spotted by Giulio Cappellini, owner of the great Italian manufacturing company. This relationship blossomed, and a series of products were developed bringing early international acclaim to the studio.
Much of Barber and Osgerby’s early work involved the folding and shaping of sheet material, influenced by the white card that they had used frequently in architectural model making. Plywood and perspex were used in the development of the Pilot Table, 1999, and Stencil Screen, 2000. The experimental Hula Stool, 2001, originated from sheet plywood, reassembled to create complex, compound curves. The Shell Table, 2002, (nominated for the Compasso d’Oro) and Shell Chair, were further structural studies in plywood.
In 2002 the pair were asked to design furniture for Portsmouth Cathedral in England and in 2004 were awarded the Jerwood Applied Arts Prize. This led to a commission to design new pieces for the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill On Sea. One of the resulting pieces, a die cast aluminium chair is now in the collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
The Zero-In table was produced by British company Established & Sons in 2005, as part of their launch collection. The table employed car industry techniques in its construction, including compound shell moulding, never before used in the furniture industry. In 2007 Barber and Osgerby were commissioned to design the furniture for the reception of the Royal Institute of British Architects in Portland Place. They were made Royal Designers for Industry by the Royal Society of Arts and launched Tab for Flos, a return to the folded form, in the same year.
The limited edition Iris tables were created in 2008 for the Established & Sons gallery. Known for their use of colour, with Iris Barber and Osgerby developed a new direction, using colour as the starting point for the work. In 2009, Barber and Osgerby launched their first major commission for Murano glassmakers, Venini. This resulted in a series of unique glass vases, created in limited editions and shown in Milan, Porto Cervo and London.
2010 saw the creation of an installation with Sony at the Milan Salone del Mobile Internazionale and an exploration into experimental objects and environments. The installation was an immersive, anechoic space engineered to eliminate ambient sounds and concentrate the senses on the soundscape created by the designers through prototype speakers that also included lighting. These objects explored and exploited Sony’s new innovations in sound technology to transform ordinary materials into sound-emitting objects.
Both professors of design at ECAL (Ecole Cantonale D'art de Lausanne), Barber and Osgerby have lectured internationally and hosted workshops at Ecal, Switzerland and the Vitra Design Museum. Barber and Osgerby's designs can be found in the permanent collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Barber and Osgerby have developed collections for a large number of clients and manufacturers such as Flos, Vitra, Magis, Cappellini, Coca-Cola, Levi's, Panasonic, Authentics, Pantone, Swarovski, Venini and Established & Sons, among others. They have also designed furniture for public interior spaces such as The De La Warr Pavilion, the Royal Institute of British Architects and the St. Thomas Cathedral in Portsmouth, England, and sculptural pieces for public spaces including Greenwich Park.