Hasta La Ideas

Designer Michael Kluver recently completed his degree from Design Academy Eindhoven and he’s pleased to present one of his student projects, “Just Chairs,” on the occasion of Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, from October 22 – 30. It’s a fairly straightforward concept: Kluver has taken four iconic chair designs from the 20th century and essentially undesigned them by mapping each one to “the simple archetype form” of a chair, sort of the Platonic ideal of four legs, a seat and a back, with the “same seating height, seating width, seating depth, overall height, and angle of the backrest.” Signature details are flattened and reduced to purely aesthetic elements, signifiers for more (or arguably less) idealistic design philosophies.

Do we need to produce more new stuff every year? Isn’t it time to slow down and look for quality and context again? A chair is for sitting. It sounds simple enough right? The original designers of these morphed chairs searched for a way of living and had an overall vision of how life should be. Over the years their designs however were ripped completely out of context and became expensive designer objects. Let us restore context again. Let them be just chairs again.

Can you identify each one? Answers after the jump…

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