These are our new dining chairs. Aren't they great? After 22 years and two Pacific crossings, our old chairs needed replacing. In addition to the usual dings and dents, their cane seating was worn out, causing me to pause every time dinner guests come over. The few intact chairs have been relegated to the kitchen.
Made of oak, the new chairs have a timeless elegance that works well with our glass-topped table (a nice Corb knock off). Designed by Naoto Fukasawa, they are the product of the wood furniture maker Maruni but are marketed through Muji. Though they look small, the seats are remarkably comfortable. According to Wallpaper* magazine, they have a "refined but fresh-from-the-workshop feel that belies [their] manufactured origins." Took the words right out of my mouth.
By contrast, these chairs were made for a workshop but have a distinctly machine -tooled aesthetic. They are actually not as uncomfortable as they look. Composed of wafer-thin sheets of steel, these chairs were designed by Junya Ishigami to accompany his building at the Kanagawa Institute of Technology in Hon-Atsugi. I re-visited the site last week with friends from the U.S. The focal point of the school's modest campus, Ishigami's low scale, transparent box achieves monumentally without being a monument. In fact, it is barely even a building. The parallelogram-shaped, glass enclosure contains a workshop where, befitting an engineering school, students can make anything they want: ceramics, computer graphics, wood products, metal works or even full size vehicles. The sky is literally the limit. Currently a hand glider made of wood and some kind of plastic graces the ceiling. The building's remarkable lightness of being still takes my breath away.
