Jouin Manku - Meet up

Article of BIG Magazine, by Emmanuelle Graffin

They are looking for what could perhaps be called the sublime or the extraordinary in their projects, whether they are in architecture, interior design, or design. They seek emotion. They are Patrick Jouin and Sanjit Manku from Jouin Manku studio.

Born in 1967, Patrick Jouin is French. More precisely, he is from Nantes, "in the sense that I am not Parisian," he smiles. His father is a craftsman, "a kind of Geo Trouvetou" and he comes from a line of cabinetmakers whose origins date back to the French Revolution, which he discovered well after his studies at the French National Institute for Advanced Studies in Industrial Design (Ensci) completed in 1992. Technology, design, inventing shapes have always been obvious to him, but "the idea of taking care of others” is a virtue inherited from his mother who is a nurse. For him, design is also that. He made his first ranges of industrial designs at Philippe Starck’s who helped him get started before starting to fly with his own wings thanks to the Via, the launching pad of French designers.

Sanjit Manku was born in 1971 in Nairobi, Kenya, to a family of Indian origin, but his parents left India to emigrate to Canada. "When you flee a country, the first generation tries to provide the base, but the second generation is freer. And even if creation, in my family, is not the heart of the subject, my parents accompanied me to find my passion," he recalls. And his passion, since his childhood, boils down to creating objects, starting with musical instruments. Very quickly he understands that it is not the object that counts, but the fact of playing with a tool. He studied at the Carleton University School of Architecture in Ottawa until 1995. A school closer to art than architecture in the continuity of its intuitive approach, where "we experimented and made a lot." He took his first steps in the interior design firm Yabu Pushelberg in Toronto. There he learns two things that will prove fundamental later: business and how to make dreams come true. 

Patrick Jouin founded his studio Patrick Jouin iD in 1998. His creativity is expressed in both industrial design and decorative arts. He collaborates with publishers such as Ligne Roset, Cassina, Fermob, Kartell or Alessi. He worked for Alain Ducasse as well as for Renault. His range is wide. His studio is growing, he is looking for an architect... At Yabu Pushleberg, Sanjit Manku feels he is losing his creativity. He took a "break", direction Europe. Rome, London, Paris, where he is looking for a sofa...

A mutual friend gets them to meet. A pure coincidence, but a common passion: drawing. "One day I had a sketchbook in my hands sent by Sanjit," explains Patrick Jouin. “I saw a Leonardo da Vinci there.” And to specify in subtitles that the Renaissance artist is the starting point of his passion. For him, there is a community of designers as there is a community of musicians: a Japanese can play in Paris with an American, and alchemy works. With drawing it is the same. "We had a similar way of searching. In this sense we are brothers, have a common DNA," he recalls. "I was looking for a sofa and Patrick was looking for an architect. Drawing has been our common language," adds Sanjit Manku. They decided to work together for a month on a London project. In 2006, with the same desire to do, they create their studio, Jouin Manku, – where Jacques Goubin is an associate today – and invent a profession at the crossroads of industrial production and the long tradition of craftsmanship, combining their experiences, their conceptual and experimental approaches.

"We both do things, work in connection with the hands, the brain and the heart. “We communicate from there," says Sanjit Manku. The two designers share the same taste for structural engineering, architecture, design, and fashion. These worlds, for them, have no borders. "We place ourselves in the line of humanists, architects, craftsmen, artists, sculptors of the Renaissance. Everything counts, everything interests us, we are curious about everything," explains Patrick Jouin. They touch everything, to create complete things. They are passionate, demanding, and like to go down to the smallest detail. They work at all scales – from the ceiling to the teaspoon or from the stairs to the doorknob – always around the drawing. "What is astonishing between us with drawing is that there is no ego," says Patrick Jouin. “We can take over the drawing of each other indifferently. The result is better than what we would have done alone.”

What the two creators are looking for is not just the shapes, but more a feeling, an atmosphere. They are seeking a feeling, a choreography, a sequence. Emotions. Whether around an object or a space. For them – and this is fundamental – each project must be different because it is part of its own context. Patrick Jouin even goes as far as to talk about the psychology of space: "What is important is the emotion generated by space. It is big, small, square, dark, tall... All these elements create animal emotions in each of us. This is the basis of what we are given at the beginning or what we are going to create." They will create with it. They will look for materials, architectural elements such as stairs, for example, objects that will vibrate the strings of the place in an alchemy of their own.

Their recipe ? "Each time, we tell ourselves a story, but by trying to put ourselves in the shoes of the one who will live the experience. Whether at the Montparnasse train station, going down the stairs of a house in Kuala Lumpur or going to the office at Biome in the 15th Paris district, or in a restaurant of Alain Ducasse... Each time, we imagine the emotions that we, but also everyone else would be likely to feel.” "It's the choreography of emotions," adds Sanjit Manku. It is more than a quest for beauty. “When we design a swimming pool in London, it is not the material or the color that matters to us. We want to create a world that goes beyond the pool itself, a poetry.”

It would be reductive to speak of an architectural or design firm. "We are also good craftsmen," says Patrick Jouin. “We have the ability to work with different materials in all their nuances and subtleties.” Artists, craftsmen, architects, designers... Their mediums are multiple, and they use them to create "what is more like a work of art. Let us be honest," admits Patrick Jouin. The designer also supports the idea that it is necessary to go beyond form and function, contrary to what the modernists claim. For the emblematic Maison du Peuple, in Clichy – whose rehabilitation has been entrusted to them – "to say that the building is purely functional does not seem totally accurate to me. This building expresses a real quest for light. It is a church of modernity," says Patrick Jouin. For him, the creator must return to a more human, more sensual, more complex dimension to move from functionality to the sublime.

At the studio, which now has about fifty employees, the share of artistic and emotional work of a major project is around 20%. All the rest of the work is on the detail. A long way, according to Jouin and Manku, to reach this sublime. Like the painter Hokusai who at 90 years old said that he was just beginning to know how to draw a human being, it is very humbly that Patrick Jouin, with the acquiescence of Sanjit Manku, admits: "We are just beginning. At some point in the project, we want to master something, but we are sorry for ourselves, because we feel we can do better." With each project, with each client, they know it: the path will not be easy to bring out the most accurate project. A path that both undoubtedly follow, nourished by the perfectionism they share – and one cultivates in oil painting, the other - the manufacturer of musical instruments and transpose in this work of the studio, to go beyond the "not bad", because "the not bad, we do not want to do it". They cannot, they do not know how to do it.