Nendo has created the Bamboo-Steel Chair, as part of the National Taiwan Craft Research Institute’s Yii series, a new project headed by Gijs Bakker, co-founder of Droog Design. It will be exhibited at La Triennale di Milano April 12-17th.
From the designers:
Our task was to discover sources for new designs through research into Taiwan’s traditional bamboo handicrafts and furniture. We were fascinated by bamboo-working techniques, and decided to draw our inspiration from these, rather than to work with the material itself. We applied bamboo-working techniques to tubular steel pipes, which can be easily mass-produced with standard levels of quality. Borrowing bamboo handicraft techniques like weaving together thinly sliced sections and joining parts by wrapping them around each other allowed us to give the hard metal a sense of pliancy.
The bamboo artisans visited the metal workshop regularly, and we had many conversations about the project and its capacities. The bamboo-steel chair is the fruit of these conversations: a symbol of new futures for traditional crafts through the cross-fertilization of different techniques and materials.
Photos by Masayuki Hayashi.
