Why Ini Archibong is in the Design 100

Ini Archibong trained at ECAL in Lausanne, and Switzerland has been his base ever since, Nigerian-American by heritage and now working from the country where he studied. The furniture and lighting that has come out of that studio reads as sculpture as readily as it does as function. His chandelier Vernus 3 now sits in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent collection, acquired for Before Yesterday We Could Fly, the museum’s Afrofuturist period room, which opened in 2021.

The commercial side of the practice carries the same range. Since 2018 he has worked with Knoll on the Iquo collection, its chairs named after three generations of women in his own family, and in 2019 Hermès brought him in to design Galop d’Hermès, a women’s watch built around the shape of a stirrup, his first venture into horology. Museum vitrine, furniture showroom and watchmaker’s atelier: the work holds its own signature across all three.