Born in Tokushima, Japan, in 1920 as a scion of long line of Kendō equipment manufacturers, in the course of the 1950s Takeshi Nii increasingly became a handcraft practitioner, primarily in wood, and subsequently moving to furniture, for all chairs, a fascination with chairs that, as best we can ascertain, and if our Japanese is as good as we hope it is, was inflamed by post-War Danish chair design, and for all by Peter Hvidt and Orla Mølgaard-Nielsen's 1950 AX chair for Fritz Hansen; and
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Our recent reflections on the La Fonda bar stool by Charles and Ray Eames, and also our recent reflections on Goethe's Donkey, Goethe's chair "just high enough that one can sit half-standing", got us very naturally thinking a lot about stools of all types, the various and varied places one meets stools, the various and varied manners via which stools interact with and contribute to our daily lives, the (hi)story and development of the stool, in particular in context of the (hi)stories and
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Upholstered furniture is called upholstered furniture for a reason, yet how often do we consider the upholstery rather than the furniture; or more accurately, how often do we consider the upholstery that makes furniture upholstered furniture? How often do we consider the upholstery that makes upholstered furniture such a singular genre of furniture? How often do we consider the upholstery that bequeaths upholstered furniture such a singular status? With the exhibition Deep-seated. The Secret
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"Dear Architect" wrote Maria Chinaglia Ponti in 1967 to the architect, but no relation, Gio Ponti, "why don't you design us some modern furniture? Daddy Walter is worried because our traditional stuff is not selling as it used to".1 An unsolicited request, from a company of whom he'd never heard, an architect of the status of a late 1960s Gio Ponti could have turned down, it wasn't as if a late 1960s Gio Ponti needed the commission; however, something about the letter from Maria Chinaglia
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With furniture, as with so much in life, it is rarely the showy, high profile, works, or individuals, that teach us most, but those works, and those individuals, who in their anonymity and modesty accompany us in invisible silence. Or rather the anonymous and quiet could teach us most, if we spent less time being distracted by, letting ourselves willingly be distracted by, the noise of the showy. With the project Monobloc author and director Hauke Wendler, and a team of co-collaborators,
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"...one only finds warmth of life and sincerity where human nature is allowed to flourish", opined the German designer Erich Dieckmann in 1931, "one shouldn't forget that in our apartments. Let's treat our contemporary homes to something humane. Something unelaborate, something provisional, with some leeway and space for things to grow as they wish over time."1 With the exhibition Chairs: Dieckmann! The Forgotten Bauhäusler Erich Dieckmann, the Kunststiftung des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt and
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Grcic A Konstantin; A Nurturing; A Reduction There are a great many legends surrounding the origins of Grcic, and while many are centred around the regions today known as München and Wuppertal, the more plausible appears to be that Grcic arose in the days of ancient Rome when a member of a large herd, a Grex, of roving furniture makers, tired of the monotony and fallacy of the repetition of the same objects regardless of context and the passage of time, stole away to pursue the development of
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As Peer Gynt reminisces with his dying mother, they dwell long and fondly on how, when Peer was a child, they would imagine his bed was a sleigh whisking them across a frozen fjord, a sleigh pulled by "fleet-foot horses". Or more accurately by a cat proxying for fleet-foot horses; a cat who before being pressed into service as a horse had been peacefully "sad på en kubbestol"1, sat upon a kubbestol: a chair hewn from a tree trunk, and an item of furniture which is as closely associated with
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In all corners of the globe one finds objects of furniture which developed in response to local conditions, traditions and practices; vernacular objects without a formal author and which although, on account of?, arising from a very specific place and time can, invariably, both teach us a lot about the essentials of furniture and help explain furniture's relationships with wider realities. And objects we want to celebrate, starting with arguably, one of the best known examples of vernacular
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The metal wire chair is such a well established seating genre it is hard to imagine it is possible to do anything new with it. Far less anything exciting. However...... ArNO by Bright Potato, as seen at Meet My Project, Paris Design Week 2018 ArNO by Bright Potato Presented in context of the exhibition Meet My Project at the VIA gallery, the joy, nay, the deep satisfaction, of ArNO by London based studio Bright Potato a.k.a Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology graduates David Beirne & Diego
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It's probably fair to say that no object at IMM Cologne 2018 confused us quite as much as the new 118 chair by Sebastian Herkner for Thonet. Not in bad way. Just in a confused way. We know, we know, what sort of being gets confused by chairs. Us. Regularly. It's why our lives' are such a mess. 118 by Sebastian Herkner for Thonet, as seen at IMM Cologne 2018 The quadratic wooden side chair is one of the true archetypes of chair design. Arguably tracing its history back to the Klismos of
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As we've oft noted in these pages, not only have designers since time immemorial had a particular fascination for chairs, but society a particular predilection. Arguably the two are related and can be traced to the long, universal, cultural, political and social relevance of the chair and the act of sitting, a state of affairs which not only makes the physical chair/seat an integral part of our lives, but the metaphorical: excitement brings us to edge of our chairs, those who are brave/foolish
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Although the evidence is not, yet, conclusive, recent years have seen an increasing confidence in the theory that sitting for too long can have a negative impact on health, and that all whose job involves prolonged sitting should regularly stand, move and generally change their body position. But what about those workers who can't? What about those workers whose job is defined by long periods of sitting? Orchestra musicians at work. Seated. Specifically, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with
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Amongst all the fake flavours at Ambiente Frankfurt 2017 the Umami of Japanese design studio Bouillon was a genuine delight. In 1909 the Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda defined Umami: the fifth taste sense, the savoury, that little touch of sensory magic which enables us to enjoy food rather than simply experiencing it. It also paved the way for Monosodium Glutamate and all those other "flavour enhancers" with which the food industry not only convince us to eat more processed food than is
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For the 13th century Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas beauty required a perfect combination of integritas, consonantia & claritas - integrity, harmony, clarity. In a similar vein the 15th century Italian playwright and philosopher Leon Battista Alberti defined beauty as the harmony of all parts in relation to one another, a character in one of his plays extending this idea to proclaim, in answer to a question concerning a woman's' beauty, "She is so beautiful that nothing could be added to her,
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On March 10th 2015 a jury at the Central District Court of California in Los Angeles concluded that Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke had relied a little too heavily on Marvin Gaye's 1977 hit "Got to Give It Up" when composing their track "Blurred Lines". For infringement of Gaye's copyright the court ordered Williams and Thicke to pay Marvin Gaye's estate $7.4 million dollars. Responding to the judgement Pharrell Williams mused in the Financial Times that "the verdict handicaps any creator
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For us one of the few genuine joys of Milan Design Week is observing visitors to the furniture fair perching on the simple metal benches to be found on the peripheries of the exhibition halls, benches which resemble safety barriers more than public seating Our joy stemming not from the irony that they find themselves surrounded by chairs in whose collective development millions of Euros have been invested, but because it is the most poetic reminder that a chair is a purely functional object.
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As many of you will be aware, back in November we struggled to find five design exhibitions opening in December for our monthly 5 New Design Exhibitions feature. We've now, somewhat spectacularly, found a sixth. In the highly unlikely setting of Gorinchem, a town of some 35,000 inhabitants in central Holland. Under the title Van stoelen bezeten - Obsessed by Chairs - the Gorcums Museum in Gorinchem is currently presenting an exhibition of some 90 objects which according to the organisers
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Standing in the Leipzig Grassi Museum for Applied Arts, surrounded by 150 years of Thonet chair history, Peter Thonet, x-times-great grandson of company founder Michael Thonet and until his recent retirement company CEO, is clearly a very satisfied man, "It makes one proud to be able to look back on a collection of objects that have not only been important for the company, but which have also, occasionally, written design history" Few visiting the new Grassi Museum exhibition "Sitting – Lying
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