Though oceans apart, Bangkok and Brazil's city of Sao Paulo have much in common. Both are cities of extremes where scattershot urban planning and stark economic disparity have resulted in a wild patchwork of affluence and squalor.
Both are the main driving cogs in emerging economies where industry and the provision of services have all but eliminated craft. Both are also informal recycling centres where, for those on the lowest income rungs at least, a survivalist ingenuity compensates for a lack of material possessions -- and results in often unthinkable and spontaneous marriages between them.
What Bangkok lacks though is anybody quite like the Campana Brothers, a design duo for whom the western hemisphere's biggest megacity is their greatest muse.
"Sao Paulo is a great source of inspiration because it's a place where people recycle bottles, old cars, everything," says Fernando Campana, alluding to the makeshift style of problem solving that is so ubiquitous in Brazil that they even have a word for it: gambiarra. "I haven't been to Bangkok but I think there are clear similarities in terms of the improvisation."
Out of a two-storey warehouse in Sao Paulo's Santa Cecilia neighbourhood, Fernando, 55, his older brother, Humberto, 63, and their team of assistants hand-craft furniture out of found materials: PVC piping, felt, cardboard, anything at hand. They've become exceptionally good at it, earning accolades and industry acclaim in a career that spans over 30 years.
One of Estudio Campana's most famous chairs is 1991's Favela. Comprised of pinewood offcuts and broken planks -- the materials used to construct Sao Paulo's rickety shanty towns -- it's been hailed as a Brazilian design classic (along with Havaiana flip-flops, the sensual wood furniture of José Zanine Caldas, and modernist buildings by Oscar Niemeyer) and made it into the permanent collection at the MoMA.
Another highly collectable hit chair, the Vermelha, is upholstered using 450 metres of wrapped and woven coloured rope. On its debut at Milan's annual furniture fair, the Salone del Mobile, in 1998, this "homage to chaos" raised a few eyebrows, but also did what so few products nowadays manage to do: stand out.
Like Sao Paulo's poorest, Humberto and Fernando starting using found objects out of necessity.
Fernando and Humberto Campana. Photos courtesy of The Campana Brothers
"Gathering scraps was a substitute for more technical and technological ways of making furniture," Humberto has said. "Early on, we didn't have money to invest in an injection moulding machine or other things."
Today they are no longer hard up, but a sustained fascination with smart, poetic solutions and desire to reflect Brazil's social fabric in a forthright and engaging manner has kept them on the gritty hunter-gatherer path.
"We always try to make portraits of our environment," explains Fernando. Back in the 80s, their environment, Sao Paulo, was -- like Bangkok -- undergoing rapid transformation, not all of it positive. Skyscrapers were being built but the slums expanded. Inequality was becoming more pronounced, not less. It was a city of scavengers as well as social climbers.
Tactile and humorous, their work also betrays an interest in indigenous crafts, or rather the decline of them in a globalised industrial economy where nearly everything is now machine-made.
"We like to use old techniques from our roots," explains Fernando, "and that have almost disappeared because no one wants to do them any more: embroidery, weaving, etc." Take the Multidão, a seat comprised of traditional cotton dolls sewn together in a higgledy-piggledy manner (and thus serving as a metaphor for Sao Paulo itself). Women in the northeastern state of Paraiba make the dolls and then send them to Sao Paulo for stitching onto a canvas backing.
History, memory, nature and happenstance also inform their work. The swirling patterns and leather panelling of their recent Cangaço collection pay homage to the loud leather clothing worn by the poor nomadic bandits, or Cangaceiros, that roamed northeast Brazil in the 19th-century. And 2015's Candy collection for Czech lighting company Lasvit reveals a clear-eyed inquisitiveness that extends to the clients.
"It was inspired by the abundance of colours the glassmakers at their factory have in their palette, while some wild mushrooms we saw growing in the basement led to our Fungo chandelier," says Fernando.
In their universe, context always informs content. This was the case when they took on their first and only hotel project in Thailand: Phangnga's exclusive Iniala Beach House. Each of the three private villas at this luxury retreat is a compendium of world-class design, and their contribution to the Collector's Villa is among the most extravagant. As it was a new build project with few reference points close at hand, they opened up their cultural lens wide.
"The colours, shapes and materials they chose are all deeply related to Thailand," says Iniala's head of design, Florencia Nahmad. "It was very interesting to share in their creative process as for them it's extremely important to understand the local culture, environment and traditions."
The private cinema, with its furry green Campana Brother Cipria chairs, was soundproofed using local coconut skin. And in the living room, a starfish-shaped blue leather Edra sofa and walls covered in blue and white Thai ceramics transport you to their surrealist vision of the ocean. Its Tropicália meets seabed.
"Contamination" is the word they keep coming back to when describing what drives them. Movies contaminate them. Music contaminates them. Sao Paulo never stops contaminating them. Even their working relationship entails a level of cross-contamination.
Disagreements are vital to how the two brothers, who both grew up larking around the streams, waterfalls and fruit orchards of Brotas, a bucolic rural town near Sao Paulo, like to work.
"I am an architect by training and my brother a lawyer," says Fernando, "and there are no filters between us. We speak the truth and that makes working together a lot lighter and easier."
Such is their influence that they are now contaminating others. You can see it in the less pared-down and less po-faced furniture designs that stand out like sore thumbs at the Salone del Mobile each year, the iconoclastic and fun designs of the likes of Spain's Jaime Hayon, among others. But more excitingly for Humberto and Fernando, you can also see it in their homeland, where they are rightly hailed as the front runners in a new wave of Brazilian design: material-led, craft-based, environmentally sustainable and often bordering on social activism.
"One of our old students Pedro Franco is now producing our first collection for a Brazilian company under his own label, A Lot of Brazil," says Fernando by way of example. "When someone from one of our workshops starts making our stuff, that too is a kind of contamination."
Multidao Chair. Photos courtesy of The Campana Brothers
