Vormstudie – looking for chair DNA

The Form Study classes at the Academy pair architecture / urbanism / landscape students with practitioners from outside their discipline in order to venture into uncharted waters of design experience. For eight weeks I had the pleasure of working with Pieke Bergmans, a dutch industrial designer with playful and sharp ideas. In this vormstudie we found a creative refuge, a place where design exercises were unfettered by the constraints of architectural demands. On day she plucked an empty milk cartridge up of the table and asked us to start drawing, and to investigate something about it that would lead us to make a chair.

I got interested in the kinky spout-flap of the milk carton and started modeling different ways abstract spout-flap units might recombine and get organized to start making a chair. This was a lot of fun. I got hooked on a cellular organismic theme and started messing around with other forms of cell structures. In the end it wasn’t so much about a chair, but about modular objects that recombine in order to make a seating environment possible. I was happy that my paper globular cell model in the end was realizable at 1:1 scale. My seating clusters were strictly stuffed with cellular components – small trash bags stuffed with paper, and the bags were grouped in units of 1, 3, or 5 depending on the size of the seating cell. In they end the seating cells happily colonized a neighbor architect’s solidly assembled mdf chair, in a story of soft meets hard, field meets object, landscape meets architecture…

Check out Pieke’s work on /www.piekebergmans.com/