Jay Osgerby was born in Oxford, Great Britain in 1969. He studied together with Edward Barber (born 1969) architecture at the Royal College of Art in London.
In 1969 they founded the studio Barber & Osgerby in London.
One of their first collaborative projects was the "Loop Table", an illusory simple coffee table with a birch ply top looping around the base, which was produced first by Isokon Plus in the UK, then by Cappellini in Italy.
In 2004 Barber & Osgerby were awarded the Jerwood Applied Arts Prize for furniture, the UK’s most significant applied and decorative arts prize. This led to a commission to design furniture for the De La Warr Pavilion, Britain’s most important modernist building. The resulting cast aluminium chair is now in the Victoria & Albert Museum collection.
In 2005 the Zero-In table was launched by the British producer Established & Sons. The table employs car industry techniques in its construction, never before used in the furniture industry. In May of the same year, in collaboration with Pantone, Barber & Osgerby created the central space for the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York. The now iconic multi-coloured flight stools were produced with corresponding Pantone reference numbers screen-printed on the side. More recently they have been commissioned to design the furniture for the entrance foyer of the Royal Institute of British Architects in Portland Place.
Barber & Osgerby were also jointly named "designers of the future" with Established & Sons at Design Basel/Miami in June 2006.
They develop collections for leading manufacturers and clients such as Magis, Authentics, Venini, Swarovski, Flos, Established & Sons and Panasonic.
Both Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby have lectured at a number of design events and design schools, including hosting workshops at Ecal, Switzerland and the Vitra Design Museum.
Barber & Osgerby’s work can be found in numerous permanent collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Design Museum, London.
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