Charles Haupt is Cape Town-based industrial designer whose works largely represented by combining industrial and organic form. Born in 1980 in Johannesburg, Haupt graduated from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology as an industrial designer in 2001. Working closely with Otto du Plessis, he has spearheaded the functional design side of Bronze Age Studio, combining modern fabrication and digitally driven design with traditional bronze sculpture-casting.

Given since childhood to stripping objects down to their elements, Charles was drawn to science at school and grew up among his  architect father’s models and plans that anticipated the order of things. He is guided from inception to production by a concern for function and process rather than adornment, but does not consider himself a minimalist; rather, he invests structural details with beauty. His work strikes a balance between reproducibility and singularity, combining the precision, efficiency and flexibility of digital and industrial processes with the tactile intimacy of hand-crafted objects.

An apprenticeship at Bronze Age Art Foundry shortly after his studies piqued his love of bronze, followed by two years working for a foundry in London. The material’s mechanical properties enabled him to explore his fascination with nature’s mathematical patterns and articulations at every scale, a subject of study since Plato that has included Fibonacci’s sequence, Turing’s morphogenesis and Mandelbrot’s fractals. Charles’ interest lies in the rhythms and logic of symmetries, spirals and tessellations that are integral to the structure and surfacing of his designs. Citing a feather among his definitions of beauty, he speaks of how it can be reduced to barbs, barbules and hooklets while at the same time underpin the mechanics of a bird’s flight en masse and be equally at play in the astounding and as yet unexplained synchronised movement of migrating flocks.