Hasta La Ideas

Last week, we covered Jiwon Choi’s Tyvek Vase in an effort to connect her with a potential manufacturer for the minimalist product. Lest she become known as a one-hit wonder for a polyethylene vessel, her portfolio includes several interesting experiments in furniture—she studied Furniture Design at RISD—such as her latest work, the Chair Morceaux (not pictured), which reminds me of RO/LU’s “Primarily Primary” chair.

However, I was particularly impressed with the Chair+Chair=Bench, which is like a vaguely Duchampian variation on the theme of convertible seating. The mirror-image siamese connection evokes both a canopy and a world turned upside-down (Ai Weiwei also comes to mind). Yet it’s not as absurd as it seems: where the title suggests a pair of chairs ‘joined at the hip’—i.e. side-by-side—to form a bench, the result is far more interesting: it functions as both an art chair and a functional bench without compromising the form of either object.

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