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Furniture Design

Embracing Touch: Designer Shapes Stools in Her (Legs') Own Image

By Sam Dunne - December 5, 2014

Despite The Onion's shock report earlier this year that the world does indeed have enough chairs for the time being ('We Can Just Keep Using The Chairs We Have,' Say Experts), the clamor for yet more novel seating solutions seems to continue apace—the biggest chair-fest of them all, Salone del Mobile, already revving up the engines ahead of next year's celebrations, holding press conferences across a number European capitals last week.

Lithuanian designer Marija Puipaite has created three such novelties—large stools, one made each from plywood, plaster and felt over MDF as part of her graduation project. Professing to be an exploration of "the designer's relation with [their] works and [their] presence in them" the form of the seats is taken from the rotational extrusion of the contours of her own legs. The stools are accompanied by this mysterious (and slightly NSFW) video examination of Marija's legs and body—the form giving 'tools' spinning like a lathe on which the chairs were (metaphorically) turned.

Not entirely navel (ankle?) gazing, Marija thesis explores the possibilities for such objects to be custom made, to act as an, "abstract monument for a certain person in a personal or public space." The idea of shaping seating from the body of a person as an act of symbolism could actually be an interesting one, and certainly less trite than a lamentation on how much an object takes or does not take the "personality" of its author. And, hey, any aesthetic referencing to the human body in furniture more subtle than Pharrell's attempt or even Casamania's Her & Him has to be a step forward.

Sam Dunne

Sam Dunne is a designer, strategist and writer based in London. Sam is founder of design strategy agency Cohere and Contributing Editor at Core77—reporting broadly on design, technology, food and object culture.

1 Comment

slippyfish

4 years ago

Z

1Z

Reply

First off: nice legs.
Secondly, and correlated to the first point: It would be interesting to compare/contrast the aesthetic appeal of the end result furniture, with the current media-standard of what "nice" legs are "supposed" to be. What if the short, dumpy, doughy legs of Jason Alexander actually produced the most appealing proportions in a table?

Finally: "the form of the seats is taken from the rotational extrusion of the contours" ... its called a 'revolve' in most CAD packages.
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