Aurélien Veyrat

Aurélien Veyrat in the spirit of the times

To support young designers and generate innovative ideas in the urban lighting sector, Petitjean decided in 2004 to introduce a competition open to students from architecture and design schools. The call has been heard because almost 80 folders were sent to the jury for the first edition of Créamat — this being the competition’s name — organized in 2005. The designer Yann Kersalé, as chairman, and the other members of this jury containing several professionals, were surprised by the audaciousness of the candidates, who had to present in their specifications a new design of pole, in association with some urban furniture. The result: exemplary proposals and an outstanding success.
The winner of the first Créamat competition is called Aurélien Veyrat. He is 24 years old and is formidably open-minded. After training in cabinet-making, he very quickly branched off in the fine arts, firstly at the school in Saint-Etienne and then the School of Decorative Arts in Paris (ENSAD). It is there that he came to know of Petitjean’s first Créamat competition. “The poster about the competition attracted me immediately. While surfing through Petitjean’s Internet site, I discovered not only the extent of its ranges but also a sector I did not know. I was rather
“furniture-oriented” at the time so it was with a completely new outlook that I worked on a proposal for a pole without a lantern, a lighting pole in its own right, taking my inspiration form the concept of time”. Solaris, his invention that won the Petitjean prize, is a pole that not only fulfils the primary function of providing perfect illumination at night but goes further by realizing this concept of time within the urban environment via an ingenious graduation of the
light source…