Moooi - Sponge Vase

The fascinating Sponge Vase has been designed in 1997 by the designer Marcel Wanders for the company Moooi. The vase was created within a project in cooperation with Droog Design and Rosenthal.

The extraordinary exterior of the Sponge Vase is being produced through a new method that the designer Marcel Wanders developed. The idea behind this was that the porcelain often does not show its fine properties when a traditional imprint form is being used for production.

The designer therefore developed a new technique, which does without this form. For the Sponge Vase a simple sponge is being dipped into fluid porcelain soil. The mass encloses the sponge and as soon as it has dried, the actual sponge is being burned in an oven.

What remains is a vivid porcelain imprint of the sponge that has been converted into a vase by Marcel Wanders. The Sponge Vase is an example for how intelligent production processes create novel objects and express the qualities of a material in a way unknown before.

Supplementary information

Data Sheet of the Sponge Vase (PDF 755 KB)

Design: Marcel Wanders

Marcel Wanders was born in 1963 in Boxtel/ the Netherlands. After being expelled from the Design Academy in Eindhoven because he was considered to be unteachable, Wanders studied in Maastricht and Hasselt (Belgium) and graduated 1988 in Arnheim cum laude. Designer Marcel Wanders