Minimally designed seating finds strength in warped wood
While exploring Milan’s Lambrate neighborhood during last week’s Salone del Mobile, we found no shortage of inspiration outside the fair. Inside one of many abandoned warehouse-turned-exhibition spaces we came across a group of promising young designers from Tel Aviv. While each designer involved in the TLV Express collective did well to experiment with materials and technology, Michael Blumenfeld‘s TRIZIN Stools caught our attention with an elegant design aesthetic and original take on construction.
The series of TRIZIN stools—Triz meaning “wedge” in Hebrew—were designed to test the physical boundaries of raw wood while combining traditional woodworking techniques. Each piece is minimally constructed from little more than a few pieces of plywood, a centralized bolt and a great deal of tensioned pressure. Using minimal hardware and no glue or adhesives of any kind, Blumenfeld gives the stools their shape by forcing a wedge attached to the top of the legs between two flat pieces of wood. As the legs go in, the wood flexes to ultimately form a comfortably warped seat with increased rigidity and strength.
The light wood, flexed seat and exposed artisanal construction combine nicely for a clean modern aesthetic that to Blumenfeld “captures the moment of transformation, and the energy put into them by the manufacturer at the time of assembly.” To learn more about Blumenfeld and his TRIZIN see the gallery below.