THE CRATE

We encounter the crate in open-air markets. Stacked up and arranged in stalls, it transports and then displays fruits and vegetables. Submerged by these goods, we can barely make out the slice. Thus the eye wanders from the leek to the turnip and hardly cares about it.
Yet this link in the food chain deserves our attention. For 60 years, its shape has remained intact: a few thin poplar slats stapled together in an openwork manner regulate the humidity of the vegetables while ventilating them. Despite this apparent poverty and its rudimentary assembly, it embodies the balance between lightness, strength and economy of materials. It thus freezes the evolution of food containers from rural basketwork to reusable crates. From these old models, its industry also preserves a manufacturing process organized according to virtuous patterns. A human, local scale, close to fields and forests. A seasonal production, like the foodstuffs it transports.
It is questioned here in all its facets through the eyes of three sensitive and knowledgeable professionals on the subject: an industrialist, a historian and an illustrator.
This issue was developed in collaboration with the Vitra Design Museum. The first part is devoted to collection photos, 45 reproductions of old and contemporary crates are printed in two-tone. The second part is devoted to texts. It includes an introduction by Alexandre D'Orsetti and a joint interview between the French artist Philippe Weisbecker, the historian Pierre Cornu and Jean-Luc Baley, director of Emballages Bois Martin. It is richly illustrated with color archive images and a report in the Cam Nouvelle crate factory in Nueil les Aubiers.