Twenty years separate Less from Less Less. In the family album, they are two succeeding generations, both equally telling the truth about the aesthetics and cultural values that bind them to the year of their birth.

“I designed Less in 1994, when the Fondation Cartier opened in Paris… I’d begun by designing tables for exhibitions, and I always located myself within the same search for the “essence” of the table.
When I was designing Less, I kept thinking about the table archetype. The delicacy of the table should come close to being like a miracle. I wanted people to ask themselves, ‘How is it made?’, ‘How does it hold together?’…
On closer analysis, Less can be read as a virtual plane with four feet and a profile like the wing of a plane. It’s prismatic in shape, totally in keeping with this desire for the elemental, this particular aesthetic quest.
20 years on, Less Less asks the same questions all over again. It’s even finer, lighter, and more mysterious.
I’ve always thought that a design object should evolve over time, reinventing itself with the evolution of production techniques, and with the complicity of the manufacturer that underwrote its development.
In this sense, Less came into being because of my meeting Piero Molteni, founder and president of Unifor. A long history has bound us together now for twenty years around Less, as we share the same determined, confident quest to improve the design, carefully fine-tune every detail, enhance and develop the range and pare right back to the essential. The revolving cabinet, Totem, for instance, has become progressively more streamlined, to the point where its base has disappeared out of sight: it has finally turned into the monolith that has haunted me in all my projects…”

Jean Nouvel

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