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The American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC) has invited leading Spanish designers Inma Bermúdez and Moritz Krefter, Jorge Penadés and Alvaro Catalán de Ocón to create three pieces of furniture for public spaces, designed to help people encounter and rediscover nature.
Inspired by the Matadero building, previously a slaughterhouse, Inma Bermúdez and Moritz Krefter have created “La Manada Perdida” (The lost herd), a set of pieces, made of red oak, maple and cherry, that evoke a group of animals that seem to be lost.

Arranged in the entrance hall of the building, they appear as benches or seats, but their design goes beyond furniture to incorporate aspects of imagination and play: the lack of definition of their function is an invitation for the user to decide how they want to engage with them. During production, the design was adapted to the material available to reduce waste, and the finished objects have minimal finishing to mimic the texture of the tree they came from.

The first inspiration for this project, ‘The lost herd’, is an old carpentry tool, the ‘shave horse’, a kind of bench with a seat and a jack that was used hundreds of years ago to work wood in a very basic way.
More than formal innovation, ‘The lost herd’, tells a story. In it there is poetry and emotion, as well as dissemination of American hardwoods, whose origin and processes are revealed through the details. Innovation in this case comes from the invitation to give the pieces a freer use; they are sculptural but also functional objects, although this function is new; it transcends and elevates the original shave horse.

2023

PHOTO©Uxío de Vila