If Milan’s Salone del Mobile is design’s most glamorous spectacle, Dutch Design Week, its Northern European cousin, feels like its eco-conscious, no-logo counterpoint. When I traveled to the industrial city of Eindhoven to experience it in the fall of 2023, I found beer and mostly vegan snacks in lieu of negronis and antipasti, few known brands, and design that ranged from the otherworldly to the pointedly political.

That year, the festivities included a café featuring plant-based burgers on blue algae–tinted buns at a flying saucer–shaped museum called the Evoluon. The artist Mette Sterre showed up at the opening party in an octopus suit engineered by robots to mimic cephalopod skin. The graduation show of the Design Academy Eindhoven—the legendary incubator for designers like Maarten Baas, Hella Jongerius, Sabine Marcelis, and Job Smeets—is an annual highlight, and that year it featured student projects as brilliant as they were biodegradable, from furniture made of discarded books to a biomaterial generated from petrified egg yolks.

I was thinking about Eindhoven when I dropped by the Friedman Benda gallery in West Chelsea last week to see Joris Laarman put the finishing touches on his first gallery show in more than a decade. Laarman graduated from Eindhoven in 2003 and was a leading light of a generation of designers who viewed cutting-edge technology not just as a tool, but as a new philosophy of form. His breakthrough piece was Bone Chair, in 2006, which he generated from algorithms that mimicked bone growth. His later designs included rococo metal furniture that drew on the pixelated style of early Nintendo games, and a pedestrian bridge built in midair using advanced robotic 3D printing.

Laarman’s chin-length hair, cropped beard, and blue jeans give him the look of an indie rocker—but his Promethean approach fusing technology and design can also, at times, conjure the kind of Scandi billionaire you might meet on a tarmac in Succession. No surprise that some of his most enthusiastic collectors are tech bros, in addition to ex-Barneys and W creative director Dennis Freedman; Queen Máxima of the Netherlands is a noted fan.

Lately, however, the designer’s futurism reflects more the dystopian anxiety of Philip K. Dick than the techno-optimism of H.G. Wells, at least where our current built environment is concerned. He is a devotee of the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, who coined the term “Symbiocene”—a proposed future state in which humans reintegrate with nature. “It’s a new creative era that is sustainable and merges nature with technology and culture,” said Laarman.

In Architectural Digest in March, the writer Sarah Medford revealed that Laarman and his partner, Anita Star, were deeply shaken after learning that the Australian bush they’d toured with their three children in 2018 had been decimated in a historic fire the following year. “It was awesome, beautiful, pristine, and then after we left the whole place burned to the ground,” he told me at the gallery. “It was shocking.”

The horror of that ecological disaster sparked a personal reckoning for the couple, who, with other families, helped establish a commune on a forested peninsula and former military base outside of Amsterdam, where they now live. Their studio, in a former munitions factory, is where they design and develop new sustainable materials in collaboration with research institutes and cutting-edge startups. “I’m anti-‘technology for the sake of technology,’” he said. “It’s pointless.”

The Friedman Benda show, Symbio, reveals the designer’s new direction. A series of rocklike benches are 3D-printed in recycled concrete, with patterns that look like coral but are drawn from algorithms developed in the 1950s by the computer scientist Alan Turing. The patterns are embedded with a bioactive substrate that supports the growth of mosses and lichens. The new material reuses concrete waste, captures carbon, attracts birds and insects, and can be used for building facades as well as furniture. Laarman’s lab has collaborated on the research with Paebbl, a Rotterdam startup now commercializing the material at scale.

Net-carbon-negative objects are cool, but as collectible design, I’d rather live with one of the pieces in the second series on view, Ply Loop. The technology here is also remarkable. Laarman realized that industrial engineered wood often contains formaldehyde-based adhesives—which means, he said, that “there are gases coming from your walls, sawdust that is carcinogenic, and the wood is noncompostable.” He’s creating plywood furniture using what he claims is the first thermoset bio-resin that’s biodegradable and recyclable. “You can actually eat it,” he told me.

Joris Laarman, SYMBIO at Friedman Benda, New York. Photo: Izzy Leung/Courtesy of Friedman Benda and Joris Laarman Lab

At Friedman Benda, there are Ply Loop chairs, a swooping wall shelf, and my favorite piece: an oak and walnut veneer bookshelf that quietly references the craft language of Charlotte Perriand’s 1960s work. Laarman still uses technology—yes, he has very much embraced A.I.—but there’s a distinct humanism and hand behind the work. “We’re a team of 15 people in the studio, from computer coders to craftspeople, including blacksmiths,” he said. “We’re not robots.”

Unfortunately, art collectors are similarly human, and there is no question that the market for Laarman’s oeuvre has seen some wild swings. While a 2006 Bone Chair sold at Christie’s in 2019 for approximately $930,000, a 2008 version went unsold earlier this year when Sotheby’s offered it with an estimated value between $150,000 and $200,000. Even the actor Jim Carrey unloaded his carved marble Cumulus table by the designer at Bonhams in 2024 for $64,000—raising the question of whether the market for Laarman’s early work has peaked, and whether his new sustainable creations will find not only admirers, but buyers.

From the start, Laarman has always managed to find the soul in the machine—even when the work is functionally designed by a robot. Now, by redirecting his tools toward ecology, collective living, and material sustainability, he may once again be aligning himself with a cultural mood. Certainly, the market is paying attention: Even before the show opened last Thursday (it runs until July 24), a major U.S. museum had already acquired the bookshelf that I admired.

At a moment when the design world is obsessed with glitz and the tech industry has largely retreated from its utopian ambitions, Laarman’s pivot feels less like a stylistic change than a full-blown reckoning. “Joris has always looked forward, far into the future,” said his gallerist Marc Benda, who has represented him since 2010. “Instead of continuing on a predictable trajectory, Joris decided to start with completely new research and reinvent his studio. It is incredibly rare for a successful artist in any discipline to be so fearless.”

Thanks, Ingrid. That was great. I’ll be back tomorrow in the Inner Circle, looking at more of the interesting lots on offer before the action starts on Thursday.

M