Biography
Jurgen Bey (b. Soest, Netherlands 1965) is a Dutch designer who graduated from the Eindhoven Academy of Industrial Design in 1989. He first gained recognition at a fair in Kortrijk, Belgium in 1993 when he exhibited with Droog Design (Dry Design), established by Renny Ramakers, the editor-in-chief of Industrieel Ontwerpen (‘Industrial Design’). Bey has taught at the Royal College of Art in London and elsewhere. He won the Lensvelt prize for interior architecture (2003), the Harrie Tillie prize (2005) and the Prince Bernhard Culture Fund prize (2005). He re-uses existing objects and gives them a new life, such as re-coating a chair with a layer synthetic material (Kokon 1999), or giving old pendants a new covering. For the new office of Interpolis, he designed a new version of the armchair which was taken into production by Prooff, a label he created together with SV Interior group. He co-founded Studio Makkink & Bey along with designer-architect Rianne Makkink in Rotterdam in 2002. In 2010 he was appointed the director of the Sandberg Institute of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.
