Philippe Starck: Cleaning Life, Not Adding Objects

For Internationally renowned French designer, Philippe Starck who was in Doha as part of Qatar Museums’ Architecture and Design: Turning Vision into a Universal Dialogue programme, design is not an act of addition but one of removal. Across four decades of practice, this industrial designer and architect has consistently questioned excess, of material, of form, and of ego, arguing instead for intelligence, longevity, and ethical responsibility. His work, spanning furniture, interiors, architecture, industrial objects, naval and spatial engineering, has shaped how design enters everyday life, not as luxury to be displayed, but as a quiet service to humanity. By Sindhu Nair

Few designers have influenced global design culture as extensively as Philippe Starck. From iconic products such as the Louis Ghost chair for Kartell and the Juicy Salif citrus squeezer for Alessi, to lighting, hospitality, housing, and aerospace projects including for the ISS, Philippe Starck’s practice moves seamlessly across genres while remaining anchored in a consistent philosophy: the less material we use, the more human our environments can become.

His long-standing interest in dematerialisation, sustainability, and reduction has found renewed relevance in recent years. At the latest Milan Design Week, Starck unveiled a lighter version of his A.I. chair for Kartell, developed using generative design tools and artificial intelligence to minimise material use while maximising structural intelligence. Produced in recycled thermoplastics, the project reflects his belief that technology, when guided by ethics and intuition, can help design respond more responsibly to environmental and social challenge.

Starck’s engagement with Qatar Museums’ Architecture and Design: Turning Vision into a Universal Dialogue Programme situates his thinking within a broader institutional commitment to architecture and design as cultural practice. The programme foregrounds critical discourse, pedagogy, and long-term reflection, bringing together voices that challenge how we build, produce, and inhabit the world. Starck’s ongoing involvement in Qatar, including work toward a school of craftsmanship and creativity, aligns closely with these ambitions, positioning design and foremost creativity as a tool for education, sustainability, and cultural continuity.

The conversation that he had with SCALE unfolds as a deep reflection on materiality, intelligence, technology, and responsibility. Expansive and unhurried, Starck’s responses mirror his approach to design itself: rigorous yet intuitive, and always grounded in the belief that design, at its best, exists to serve life.

SCALE: Your work has consistently challenged the idea of luxury, moving it away from ornament and exclusivity toward intelligence, longevity, and emotional resonance. How do you define luxury today, in a world where consumers are increasingly conscious, and how does your own practice help shift luxury away from excess toward meaning? Is there a ‘new luxury’ you believe designers must champion?

Philippe Starck: First, I do not like the word Luxury, but if you insist, I believe there are different forms of luxury. One is rooted in the idea of displaying that you have more money than your neighbours and using it to overshadow others, a notion I truly dislike. The other is what I would name Harmony: one grounded in the accumulation of every quality and every intelligence, approached with rigour and honesty. A product made extraordinarily well, conceived not for three months of fashion but to last a lifetime and even passed through generations, and that may initially cost more. It is not luxury because it is expensive; rather, it has a certain cost because proper making and true longevity require it. True luxury begins with necessity, with the intelligence of its conception, the honesty of its fabrication, and therefore its quality and durability.

The future is based on dematerialisation, which means less materiality for more intelligence. If one looks at the history of the computer, which was a building, then became a small house, then a wardrobe, a large suitcase, then a flight case and now a watch, which tomorrow will be integrated under the skin. This means that the product disappears, and the more it disappears, the more powerful it becomes. In my own practice, that I encourage and advocate, I consistently strive to create with the minimum of the minimum, because I believe that the less, we have, the better we are.

SCALE: Designers are often celebrated for producing, for creating, for adding things to the world. Yet your philosophy has also embraced the idea of reduction, restraint, and knowing when to step back. How do you decide when a project truly needs your intervention, and when the best design choice is to leave something untouched? What does this discipline of “not designing” teach young designers today?

Philippe Starck: Every product should have a legitimate reason for existing and should genuinely improve the lives of as many people as possible. This is why I never create a design simply for the sake of creating one. Before the product there is always a project; before the project, an ethic; and before the ethic, a philosophy that becomes a vision guiding everything.

Then, there are a few essential rules, the first being absolute honesty — honesty with oneself and with everyone else. One of the ways I understand honesty in my work is by ensuring that I am always truly at the centre of the subject. It is like archery. Archery means throwing again and again until the arrow finally reaches the centre.

One must always be at the core, at the bone, at the truth of the subject. Only when reaching that core can one begin to build something upon it, something that might be timeless, that might carry a sense of dream, and that might last forever. Finally comes the way of making: it must be done always with the minimum of energy and the minimum of material.

SCALE: Your pieces, whether a lemon squeezer, a chair, or an interior, carry a specific energy: playful yet rigorous, minimal yet never cold. What are the fundamental ingredients that make a design unmistakably yours? Are these decisions conscious, or do they emerge subconsciously from years of developing a personal design vocabulary?

Philippe Starck: All my life, I have tried to avoid having a style. I have always transgressed the rules, and if there is one constant, it is my logic. Whether I am working on a space station, a hotel, or even a toothbrush, the creative process remains the same. The benefit the users will get from my creation, what it shall bring them. Design is always a question of Intuition: the desire to do something, the emergence of an idea. It is also a question of bringing harmony to all the parameters involved.

I often envision a creation as a ball: at the beginning, when I work on it, it is a little wobbly; then, as I refine it, it becomes smoother, more polished, more precise. And when it reaches the state of a stainless-steel ball, a crystal ball, then I know that all the parameters are finally balanced. Of course, I can always reorient some parameters, stretch them, distort them, and the ball may become oval. But a moment inevitably arrives when harmony appears, when everything aligns. Rather than through a conscious stylistic signature, my design is perhaps recognizable through this search for balance and harmony, where the foundations always remain the same: logic, intuition, and honesty. And a drop of poetry and humour I hope.

Since a very young age, I have understood the importance of preserving resources, of protecting our environment. This is why I am constantly looking for new solutions, always trying to go as far as possible, resisting trends, exploring new technologies, and pushing industries for the development of innovative and durable materials such as bioplastics or 3D-moulded plywood. Technology in itself is neither disruptive nor transformative of the essence of design or humanity; it is only our use of it that matters. We can choose to use it for something good, something that benefits the community, or waste it on the useless. Only technology can make everything sustainable, whether it means creating new materials like seaweed plastic or designing a chair from recycled industrial waste.

Technology is one of the great symptoms of human intelligence, and in that sense, we are technological animals.

It is up to us to be intelligent enough to remain masters, not slaves, of technology, and to support those who create honest, intelligent, and visionary products.

This approach is what I call Eco-nomy and Eco-logy, enabling us to produce the best possible service with the least amount of energy and with the most responsible material. It is the only true guarantee of timelessness for a product or a project.”

SCALE: Your designs often occupy a fascinating space between advanced manufacturing and the intimacy of craft. How do you envision the future relationship between traditional craftsmanship and the digital/AI driven tools emerging today?

Philippe Starck: Artificial intelligence is a great tool for working, but for now, not yet for creating. We have seen that the results have incredible potential. We can see that its power is unprecedented, but it is a power that has – yet, neither heart nor brain. Today, humans still have this creative spark, this intuition that machines do not have. Yet the pace of change is such that we may be surprised tomorrow.

SCALE: Many of your creations have become icons, objects that enter everyday life but also museums. Do you design with timelessness in mind, or does timelessness occur only when an object connects to something universal in human behaviour? An object that you have designed that falls firmly under timeless designs in your opinion.

Philippe Starck: I have no academic intelligence. I cannot think in an orthogonal manner: I don’t know the alphabet, I don’t know the months of the year in their right order, I can’t multiply or subtract numbers. I simply don’t have the software to think this way. But I am a monster of intuition. Inside me lives a sort of creature, a subconscious magma that keeps working on everything I know and everything I don’t know. It is this subconscious that delivers answers to questions.

I even may never have formulated. Those questions might date back 40 years or 5 years, yet the answers appear in a fraction of a second, already complete. My task is merely to bring them to the surface, to print them. Eventually I am the printer of my subconscious and, as such, my only responsibility is to maintain the quality of my ink cartridges. However, I have this habit of trying to understand everything I see. I take in the things around me, I observe them, I analyze them, I understand them, and I constantly connect and re-connect everything. In this way, broad outlines emerge at an extraordinary speed, and this gives me the ability to anticipate what is going to happen.

It is not for me to say whether my creations are good or not, but I believe that when a project is distilled down to its minimum, this creates the conditions for timelessness to exist. In that sense, timelessness arises when an object resonates with something universal in our collective memory, something shared and deeply human.

For instance, the Louis Ghost chair edited by Kartell is an invisible friend shaped by our occidental collective subconscious. I didn’t want not to “design” the object in a formal sense, but to question our shared memory of what a chair is and translate it with the most modern parameters. Twenty-five years after its creation, Louis Ghost is still a huge success. Its longevity genuinely makes me happy because it means that I did my job well.

SCALE: A recurring quality in your work is the presence of emotion, humour, joy, seduction, expressed through highly functional objects. What role do emotion and personality play in your design process, and how do they coexist with the rigour of engineering, manufacturing, and usability?

Philippe Starck: An object, a project is born out of necessity. Therefore, it must be functional particularly by incorporating parameters such as comfort, ergonomic, energy, cost relevancy, and intelligent materials. However, I am what one might call an enlightened functionalist; that is to say that not all parameters are purely functional. I consider immaterial parameters to be equally fundamental, such as honesty, timelessness, longevity, poetry, and a touch of subversion and humour.

Humour is one of the most beautiful symptoms of human intelligence. It allows everything to be put into perspective, almost like a kind of Einsteinian relativity. It reminds us that we can play with anything. When I create, I enjoy taking serious things lightly and light things seriously. Alongside love, humour helps us become better human beings. This emotional dimension coexists naturally with the rigor of engineering, manufacturing, and usability, because it brings humanity to function.

SCALE: Doha is at an exciting crossroads, rapidly modernizing while preserving cultural identity, material histories, and environmental consciousness. If you were to design something specifically for Doha—an object, interior, or urban intervention, what aspects of the city’s architecture, climate, or cultural storytelling would shape your design?

Philippe Starck: Qatar is a nation of remarkable elegance and intelligence, inhabited by people who truly embody these qualities.

Anything is possible there, so if Doha were a design, it could only be the prototype of something extraordinary and revolutionary.

That’s why we are currently working on a school of craftmanship and creativity. QPS will be a unique interdisciplinary pedagogical model combining traditional crafts like woodworking and glassblowing for example with advanced digital design, including rapid prototyping, parametric modelling and many both low- and high-technologies especially aimed at finding sustainable solutions to energy saving and climate change issues. It is a vital project, and I am very honoured to join the creative vision of Qatar.

SCALE: You have created so many iconic pieces across scales and typologies. Is there a design challenge, a question, or a dream you feel you have not yet resolved, something that continues to pull you forward creatively?

Philippe Starck: There is only one design challenge that drives me: peace.

Cover Image: Philippe Starck by Jean Baptiste Mondino, 2018

Picture Credits: Qatar Museums and Starck Designs