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Though Oscar Tusquets Blanca is an “architect by profession, painter by vocation, writer out of the need to make friends” and a designer only “by adaptation,” it’s his design work we’re most excited about, especially his latest piece, the Fontal Chair, which the Spanish furniture manufacturer, Expormim, presented in the Salone del Mobile in Milan last month.
Cane chairs were popularized with Marcel Breuer’s 1928 Cesca Cane Chair, which paired a rattan seat and backing with a bent metal frame. Blanca’s design is more of a return to basics, not only in his use of traditional rattan, but because he doesn’t combine it with more modern materials. It’s simple and elegant, suitable for the kitchen or for a more formal dining table. I’d also imagine it promotes good posture. While it’s beautifully crafted that back looks none too comfortable. Here’s what Blanca himself has to say about his design:
“The project was born from the desire to take back rattan as a noble material, building on the rich tradition of craftsmanship in our country that supports its use. To that end, we tried to give the hundred-year-old technique a new look, which was achieved by substituting the traditional strutting and joint wrapping for a twinning technique to join one reed to the next. With this innovative option, we created a flexible yet resistant structure that is very lightweight. A light, warm, charming and luxurious, in the true meaning of the world, chair.”
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Sticks aren’t a brand new design, but since I’ve never seen a cabinet system quite like it I think deserves some attention anyway. Made in 2011 by Gerard de Hoop, a product and interior designer based in the Netherlands, Sticks come in four different heights and widths and a variety of colors, so you can customize them to fit the needs of your space. They can be used a lowboard, sideboard, small wardrobe or as a single loose cube that can serve as a nightstand or side table.
Which brings me to their best design feature (if it wasn’t obvious already): they stand on one leg, making them the pirates of the cabinet world. Really, their one-legged-ness comes from de Hoop’s devotion to minimalism, so minimal, in this case, that he did away with 75% of the product’s base. Still, they’re just as stable and function just as well as their quadraped counterparts.
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Is it just me or does the Medici chair by Konstantin Grcic, a Munich-based industrial designer, look like a much improved version of the classic Adirondack chair? Not that I don’t like the Adirondack chair – I have half a dozen on my back patio – but Grcic’s chair is the meeting point between American NorthEastern traditional and European chic.
Designed for the Italian furniture manufacturer Mattiazzi, the chair was actually “born” on their factory floor. Grcic said “The chair was inspired by the material, the machinery and, of course, the skill and craftsmanship of the people we worked with…Right from the beginning, I was looking for a distinct grammar for my design, a language that would express the characteristics of wood. I liked the idea of working with planks. They signify the very beginning of the production process – a tree trunk that is cut into slices. I like the way in which a carpenter joins wood. It is immediate and direct. The construction remains visible and easy to read. Structure turns into form.”
Medici comes in three different kinds of wood: Walnut, Douglas Fir (in natural and yellow) and, for outdoors, thermo-treated Ash.
“Designing for Mattiazzi was like a personal time travel. It took me all the way back to my professional roots. At the very beginning of my career, I was trained a cabinet maker. Working with wood is what I learnt from scratch. It is where it all started for me.”
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Even after Salone Del Mobile is over, I’m still thinking about The Front Room’s presentation at Ca’Laghetto, Via Laghetto, which featured a number of remarkable designers, including the Rotterdam-based Earnest Studio headed by Rachel Griffin. For Milan this year she presented Swell, a series of stools and benches that put an emphasis on the production process by cutting costs at every stage.
“Upholstered furniture typically uses foam created in massive block molds and cuts it into smaller pieces that are added to a separate frame. Swell integrates these production elements by using the frame and fabric as the mold for the foam. This also allows the foam to acts as a binding agent, eliminating costly handwork.”
Griffin goes on to explain that Swell simplifies the production process. Instead of molding massive blocks of foam, cutting them down to size, gluing them to a wooden frame and then sewing the fabric on top, “Swell uses the fabric and frame as the original mold for the foam.” The result cuts down on production time and materials and, because the foam fills the fabric, “no material is wasted as cut-offs.” Furthermore, the foam acts as a binding agent between the fabric and frame so there’s no glue, extra adhesive or sewing necessary. And since the foam expands in the fabric in a slightly different way each time, every piece is unique.
Swell Stool and Bench are available from The Front Room’s online shop for $393 and $542, respectively.
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German designer Alexander Seifried named his latest furniture collection Stijl after De Stijl, the Dutch art and design movement that advocated “pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and color.” Traditionally De Stijl-ers focused on vertical and horizontal lines and used only primary colors in addition to black and white. That’s a bit limiting, and though I appreciate the rigors of De Stijl, black, blue, red and yellow furniture doesn’t exactly assimilate very well into too many homes nowadays.
Fortunately, Seifried didn’t think so either. His Stijl collection updates white to include raw birch wood and black to include shades of gray. Added bonus? It’s something of a BIY (build-it-yourself) unit. The main component is a desk with a bright yellow drawer. When you add any combination of the chair, seat, bench and corner bench piece, it becomes a dining table. If you buy two of each seating elements you get a full circle of seats. What’s Dutch for wunderbar? (Okay, I couldn’t help looking it up: prachtig!)
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Industrial designer Jordi Blasi specializes in minimal, practical and, most importantly, durable objects, like outdoor trash bins, large modular seating units and bottles for commercials products like beer, milk and tomato sauce. One of his most recent projects is Branca, a standing “simple and functional coat hanger” that you could use in your home, but its intended for more heavy duty repeated, daily use in an office.
The first thing you might notice when you look at all the components laid out (see image below) is that there’s not a lot there – only seven pieces: a painted steel body and base and hooks made of injected strengthened plastic. By eliminating excess components – even nuts, bolts and screws – Blasi not only simplifies the assembly process and minimizes the packaging, he makes it much more economical – a major factor for anyone outfitting an entire office building, for example. Plus, it’s not as if he sacrifices on design. I love how the hooks can be used as knobs or as loops for coat hangers.
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Sofia Lagerkvist, Charlotte von der Lancken and Anna Lindgren of the Swedish design studio Front recently created the Collage chair for artisan furniture manufacturer Gemla. Front combed through Gemla’s archives for inspiration and came up with a collage, so to speak, of the company’s history of products.
Once you look you can see many different chair designs at work here. The legs and rounded back bar remind me of classic midcentury cane chairs, but the shortened backrest recalls a lounge or side chair, while the webbing is reminiscent of vinyl pool furniture. Clearly, the Collage chair, with its supple, dyed leather and handcrafted wooden base is a far cry from patio seating. And unlike other furniture manufactures, Gemla has an in-house team of woodworkers and craftsmen that make their pieces. Collage is not for sale directly from the site. Rather, it’s made to order to enable the client to choose their own colors and materials
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Before Harry Bertoia made his eponymous furniture collection for Knoll in the early 50s, he was an artist and jewelry maker. He even made the wedding bands for Charles and Ray Eames. But once his gridded metal collection became a hit at Knoll he’s been known first and foremost as a furniture designer.
The most famous of the five pieces he made is, of course, the Diamond chair, a chair that’s more sculpture than traditional seating. In fact, Bertoia noted that “If you look at these chairs, they are mainly made of air, like sculptures. Space passes right through them.” As one of the most important pieces of furniture designed in the 20th century, it’s the Cooper-Hewitt’s Object of the Month for April.
Made from welded steel in polished or satin chrome or bonded rilsan, it’s scratch, chip and chemical resistant. Some of the pieces in the collection include cushions, which are affixed with snaps or feature stretched fabric, pulled taut across the entire front. I wish I could sit in one all month long, but until I upgrade my simple wooden Adirondack deck chairs to something of the midcentury variety, I will continue to gaze longingly at Bertoia’s masterpiece from afar. [ harrybertoia.org ]
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lightfalls | 3m architectural markets + todd bracher
csys task light | jake dyson
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