The work of designer Emma Cogné moves within a hybrid territory between design, textiles, and architecture, where objects cease to be simple functions and become tools for redefining space and the relationships that pass through it.
Within this context comes Friendship stool n°1, one of her explorations that struck us the most: a seat made by assembling fragments of discarded industrial carpet. Standardized materials, designed to be replicated endlessly in work environments, are recovered and recomposed into a unique object, where each piece preserves signs, textures, and colors from its past. The result is not so much a stool as a relational structure, in which modular logic is transformed into a collective gesture.
This attention to material and its contradictions returns in Radio moquette, an ongoing project that investigates the residual life of carpet tiles, objects suspended between working and domestic space. Conceived in the 1970s as symbols of a modernist future, these surfaces now survive as relics of a “mature” market, difficult even to dispose of. Cogné cuts, washes, perforates, and reconfigures them, exploring their impertinence, resilience, and a form of almost humble beauty, where value lies precisely in their resistance to destruction.
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More broadly, her practice — also presented during last year’s Milan Design Week — builds an ongoing dialogue between craft and a conceptual approach. Through what she defines as Système T, Cogné works with textiles as an expanded language, capable of connecting ancient techniques and industrial remnants. The result takes shape in rhythmic surfaces, installations, and furniture that function as true playgrounds, where pattern, material, and space intertwine to reflect human dynamics and cultural interconnections.
Whether working with discarded carpets or more complex textile structures, Cogné consistently reduces the object to its essence before rebuilding it as an open system. Her work thus focuses on processes of resistance, reorganization, and transformation, imagining new possibilities for materials and spaces in crisis.
