Hasta La Ideas

Paris 2012: chair brand Emeco presented a new collection of seating by French designer Christophe Pillet at Maison & Objet in Paris this week.

Called Sezz, the series of five chairs were originally created for a hotel in St.Tropez.

They feature handmade recycled aluminium shells with or without upholstery pads.

Emeco are the company behing the iconic all-aluminium Navy Chair first designed in 1944 for the US Navy, which they relaunched in a plastic version made from recycled cola bottles in 2010.

Read more about Paris 2012 in our special category.

Here are some more details from Emeco

The Sezz Collection

Emeco is pleased to present a collection of designed aluminum chairs, stools and swivel chairs entitled Sezz by French designer Christophe Pillet. Known for works that meditate on notions of time as well as the esthetic and illustrative memory, Pillet brings these themes together in five pieces: A series of timeless, handmade recycled aluminum chairs and stools manufactured at the Emeco factory in Pennsylvania US.

“The Sezz chair is a little story about Emeco and what Emeco has become, the capacity of the best of the best. It is a specific story, an interpretation of the Emeco way,“ says Pillet. “ When I sit in a Sezz chair it makes me feel happy. Christophe combined our craftsmanship, material, and unique process to create a new modern icon,” said Gregg Buchbinder, CEO at Emeco.

Pillet’s collaboration with Emeco commenced specially for the Sezz Hotel in St.Tropez where he envisioned interiors with a sense of deap value; the connotation of a home away from home. By blending furniture like a vacation house, Pillet creates an intimate and homely feeling. “ When I was a young kid, I grew up in a home full of Eames furniture. At that time they looked modern and unique and they still do today. Christophe has captured that same poetry. Sezz will be forever young,”said Buchbinder.

The city of St.Tropez is an international hot spot for summer fest but parallel to the glamour is a classic French village. “All hotels in the area are the same – fashion hotels. I wanted the opposite.The precious thing for me is the quality of the sun in southern France. I wanted the hotel to feel like the smell of the skin when you are on the beach. It is all about taking advantage of nature, the shadows, the trees, the sun – truly creating a down tempo. It is more like building a scenography or blending a perfume using the ingredients and flavors of past memories,” said Pillet.

The Collection is a charming fusion of comfort and durability, a sense of embracement; raw industrial strength yet with the sensual sophistication of a French lounge seat. “The look is very subtle, but holds an unbelievable quality; you don’t see the welding, the recycled aluminum, the indestructibleness, they are all real but invisible values, the hidden territory of
a luxury product,”said Pillet.

Sezz emphasize Christopher Pillet’s ongoing interest of the emotional connection to objects. “The chair is not made to look a certain way, but to make you instantly want to climb up in it and have a nap. The idea is to be timeless and create desires, using the objects in its purest form. When you collect, you choose items you would like to keep for a long time and not throw away, even when these items are not in fashion, you still love them,”said Pillet. “In 100 years from now, Sezz will be the kind of chair you will find in a flea market or perhaps a museum. Both require products that last,”said Buchbinder.

“Today we buy items because we desire the memories attached. I sometimes see my job as a designer just like the writers, artists or movie makers – it is about storytelling. You buy furniture because they are representing your sentimental values, like keeping old photographs. Its all moments in your life. Same when you are choosing furniture, its building your story,”said Pillet.

Emeco with Christophe Pillet
First installed at the The Sezz Hotel St. Tropez, France

Paris 2012: Swedish designers Claesson Koivisto Rune present this lounge chair with a little work table attached at Maison & Objet in Paris this week.

Called Isola, the design for Italian brand Tacchini features a wide asymmetrical shell so users can shuffle about and get comfortable in public places like hotel lobbys.

See all our stories about Claesson Koivisto Rune here.

Maison & Objet continues until 24 January.

Here are some more details from the designers:

ISOLA
Easy/work chair

“With your own private table built in to Isola’s organically-shaped and generous seat shell you can relax comfortably and find new ways to work and play!”

ISOLA is a new typology of armchair. A furniture design for today, where we are constantly connected to the internet via laptops, tablets, smartphones and other portable devices.

While using these devices in many public or semi-private situations, we noticed that seating postures change. People tend to lounge around, seeking unconventional positions and generally sitting in a more relaxed fashion.

As a response to this, we designed a wide and roomy seat-shell with a gently-organic shape lacking an obvious direction. Combined with an integrated, oval tabletop, Isola moves away from other more rigid solutions and encourages more open and intuitive use.

Of course, having the small table close at hand makes for a very practical place to rest your (analogue) book, glass of wine, or a bite to eat too.

This high chair by Vienna designers Patrycja Domanska and Felix Gieselmann gives coffeehouse patrons a view over the heads of others.

Entitled Homage to Karl, the chair is designed in tribute to Austrian author Karl Kraus, who is said to have written much of his literature in Viennese cafes whilst observing day-to-day activity.

The chair was presented during Vienna Design Week 2011 as part of the coffeehouse exhibition The Great Viennese Café: A Laboratory, to which eight designers contributed furniture and objects.

Sitters climb a wooden ladder to get onto the chair and can place their drinks onto or inside two attached boxes that also serve as an armrest.

You can see more stories from Vienna Design Week here, including another temporary coffeehouse.

Here’s a little more text from the designers:

“Homage to Karl” by Patrycja Domanska and Felix Gieselmann

Initiated by the Museum of Applied Arts Vienna (MAK) Patrycja Domanska and Felix Gieselmann designed for the exhibition and temporary coffee house “THE GREAT VIENNESE CAFÉ: A LABORATORY. Phase II and Experimental Design” an unusual, single piece of furniture  in remembrance of Karl Kraus’s coffeehouse-based self-discovery and other experiences:

The Viennese coffee house is a special institution, whose meaning outreaches the sum of its coffee variations.

Who held something on himself, sat down not only in the coffee house to write, but also to correspond to the picture of a contemporary author. Owing to their written documentations of that environment, the coffee house has the value of a cultural heritage.

“Homage to Karl” is a study of this microcosm and translates that narcissism in view of the topical context of the scene coffee house and his liven by the visitors. The literary descriptions of the approach and selfrepresentation of the belletrists are used as a basis and are turned to the homage to them and their meaning for the institution of the coffee house.

The raised hide creates moments of selfstaging but also offers the possibility of the retreat, both caused by the rise of the seat. Not only the actual position of viewer and looked are put in a new tension relation, but also their points of view to each other are in a new composition.

A personal field serves for the preservation of private objects as well as as a table and allows by his mirrored surface, on the one hand, tohis user, on the other hand, also to the surrounding people a constant back coupling of the own appearance.

Austrian designer Robert Stadler has created a new bistro chair for Thonet, a brand famed for their bentwood chairs synonymous with cafe culture that have hardly changed in a hundred years.

Stadler’s Chair 107 borrows the language of the original but incorporates a flat backrest and can be produced in a process that’s almost entirely automated.

Stadler designed the chair for the interior of a restaurant for the Corso brand in Paris – see his restaurant interior on Avenue Trudaine here and the one on Place Franz Liszt here.

The original Thonet cafe chairs were designed in 1859, produced in their millions and distributed worldwide.

Yesterday we published a movie in which American furniture designer Matthias Pliessnig wraps a Thonet chair with strips of steam-bent white oak to create a sculpture – watch it on Dezeen Screen.

Photographs are by Constantin Meyer and Charles Negre.

The details below are from Stadler:

To design a new bistrot chair for Thonet is a touchy task. Initially I was proposed to customize a typical Thonet chair for the Corso restaurants, for which I am in charge of the design.

But I preferred to elaborate a new chair instead of producing one more Designer comment on this essential piece of furniture. My starting point was the fact that today chair 214 (historically baptized Nr. 14) is rather expensive, which represents a certain break in regards to Thonet’s history.

Indeed the company is renowned for being the first to achieve a world-wide distribution of their furniture thanks to it’s ingenious conception based on dismantling.

Yet, after more than 40 million sold chairs the manufacturing of the back part is still rather traditional.

With chair 107 I focussed on a new design of that element which is now being produced in an almost totally automatic process.

Dutch designers Tjep. have reduced part of a mass produced Ikea chair to a skeletal form to evoke the receding state of the global economy.

One corner of the standard chair has been carefully sanded so that hardly any material remains.

The fragile chair can no longer support the weight of a person as, like the economy, it is too diminished.

Some other chairs worth a look on Dezeen include one weighing 1.3 kilograms and another with a ladder-back reaching into the sky – see all our stories about chairs here.

Here is some text explaining the project from the designers:

“The furniture you haven’t seen at the Dutch Design Week.”

After visiting the Dutch Design Week two weeks ago, I was struck by how little the design world seems to react to the immanent economic crisis threatening Europe and the world. So here is a little something to make up for my esteemed colleagues. Following up on the XXL chair from 2005 we now present the Recession Chair.

Receding is the act of withdrawing and diminishing. We were interested in exploring the visual impact of receding in relation to a design object. We took an Ikea mass produced chair and started sanding it to the finest possible version. The result is a process where the chair goes from normal, to diminished, to skeleton like. The resulting object is barely functional as it most likely won’t withstand the weight of the person it’s trying to support, much like a society plagued by recession.