study for a chair

The project began after a period of time living with the Cesca B32 chair by Marcel Breuer, positioned at my desk at home, I often found myself analysing its form. In this way, new forms started to emerge and develop in my mind, and when kammer approached me, a ’study for a chair‘ was born.

kammer provided a Cesca B32 chair as my starting point. The idea was for me to engage with the gallery space in Hamburg for one week and work with the materials on site. Working at, and with the materials of a site sits as one of my core interests as a designer.

Together, we examined the wood properties of the trees growing in the gallery garden. We set up a temporary workshop where I could cut, boil, and bend the branches, as well as bamboo, that was sourced at a local garden center.

This became a form-finding exercise, a highly concentrated and manual process of heat-bending branches trimmed from the gallery garden, to reorder the familiar lines of the studied Cesca B32 chair.

On the first day, I worked together with Bennet from Ballern Cycles to adapt the tubular metal structure. In the four days after this, I spent time form-finding the woven and wooden section, using the metal frame as a reference for scale and positioning.

Gustav Kammer, and I felt the outcome of the project belonged in the context of prototyping research and we decided to dedicate the presentation to this specific and cherished outcome. The adapted metal structure will be developed at a later stage into a finalised chair design.

Text by Grace Prince