A Beautiful Mind

Designer Dror Benshetrit brings his latest work, QuaDror, to Miami.

Dror Benshetrit’s body of work belies his young age. At only 34 years old he’s produced furniture for Cappellini, tableware for Alessi, cabinetry for Boffi, and a line of furniture and accessories for Target, to name just a few of his recent commissions. And while he’s certainly in good company at the aforementioned design powerhouses, its his latest and perhaps most ongoing project, QuaDror, that may catapult Benshetrit to design icon fame.

“It was actually serendipitous how this shape came to be,” says Benshetrit. “I was working on a chandelier for Swarovski Crystal Palace [in 2007] and I was looking for a way for two squares of the same size to intersect. I kept playing with these shapes and I lined them up in a certain way and that was it. That was the start.”

That start eventually led to QuaDror, which in its simplest explanation is a collapsible joint with four L-shaped pieces that once locked together have impressive load-bearing capabilities. While that may sound less sexy than, say, a Peacock chair for Cappellini, this unique space truss geometry has a captive audience of engineers, architects and developers. “His ability to engineer a concept like this is inspiring,” says Darin Held, co-founder of the Miami and Doha based Bloom Interior Architecture. “Dror is a designer who is contributing to our social consciousness and truly using design to impact the world we live in.”

Dror Benshetrit presents QuaDror at Miami’s Wolfsonian-FIU Museum on October 14. For more information visit wolfsonian.org.

Photos: courtesy Studio Dror