209: Material behaving against type
Five objects and a room, each calibrated to a single substance: stainless steel stitched with leather, mesh that holds like fabric, cast glass resting by weight alone, a cedar tower made to...
At The Sun Room in Seoul, Pul Collection by Nara Lee opens with stainless steel cut, punched, and stitched together with oversized leather straps, the steel bowing slightly under weight. The other five works this week share the method: pick one substance, hold to it, let the material’s own behaviour set the form.
At the Fondazione Dries Van Noten in Venice, Seongil Choi folds a single sheet of perforated steel mesh into HMP Chair 01, coats it in red polyurethane, and lets it behave more like paper than metal. From Berlin, Obscure Objects and Maximilian Beck cast a glass seat that rests on its steel frame by weight alone. In Tokyo, VUILD slip Prewood into a Nihonbashi fire-prevention district, a cedar module tower assembled in two days and conceived for disassembly. In Madrid, Maximale renovate Casa St-Maximale as a genuinely vertical townhouse around a single oak staircase. And from France, Jinyong Lian’s Trust Me builds twenty-seven staged tableaux where self-doubt is treated as choreography rather than confession.
Nara Lee presents her first object collection at The Sun Room in Seoul — stainless-steel furniture stitched together with leather straps, named Pul after the Korean word for grass, designed to flex slightly when sat on.
Presented at the inaugural show of the Fondazione Dries Van Noten in Venice, Seongil Choi‘s HMP Chair 01 builds a functional seat from folded perforated steel mesh coated in successive layers of red polyurethane.
From Berlin, Obscure Objects and Studio Maximilian Beck produce Rest Chair, a seat of large-scale cast glass resting on a minimal stainless steel frame through weight alone.
The smallest brief in the discipline. Bent beech, riveted aluminium, forged steel, salvaged timber set in molten aluminum, plywood veneer, flat-pack logic. Chairs that lean into process, into material memory, into sculpture; chairs that refuse the distinction between furniture and object. Argued out one piece at a time — because the chair is where form and function meet most visibly, and most honestly.
From Jutaku: VUILD inserts a narrow cedar tower into Nihonbashi-Kayabacho, Tokyo — a modular timber building assembled in two days on site, designed for disassembly, and conceived as construction that outlives any single urban plot.
From DwellWell: In Madrid, Maximale renovates Casa St-Maximale, an uncommon urban townhouse where vertically stacked floors, oak-panelled volumes, and a sequence of patios redefine how a city dwelling can be inhabited.
Trust Me is an ongoing staged-portrait series by Jinyong Lian, a France-based Chinese photographer whose work — twenty-seven images treating self-doubt as choreography.
