Urban Fabric

Cross continents in a few strides with rugs from Four O Nine, an architecture and design company co-founded by Andrei Zerebecky and Lukasz Kos. Currently based out of Shanghai, the company is named for the house the duo shared while attending the University of Toronto together.

The Urban Fabric series of rugs, crafted from either New Zealand virgin wool or a high-lustre silk blend, mimic synthetic patterns on the earth’s surface and are inspired by the indelible imprints left by man-made divisions of land, agriculture, infrastructure, and architecture. The woven maps are abstract renderings concocted from satellite views of large urban areas such as Manhattan, Shanghai, and Beijing’s Forbidden City. (Upcoming pieces include Los Angeles, Berlin, Barcelona, London, the Great Wall of China, Tokyo Bay, the Netherlands, and Rome.) Each rug is hand-tufted and hand-carved in Thailand and India, an effect that adds texture to the surface.

There is one slight deviation in the series: the Timezone rug, in which the world is divided by intangible yet governing time zones. While not of a specific place, like the other rugs, the Timezone rug nevertheless demonstrates Four O Nine’s fascination with manufactured categorizations of the earth. The grey shading (darkest at the ends and light in the middle) imitates the effects of day and night, yet another homage to the pair’s global-inspired concepts.

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