For well over a decade, British designer Max Lamb has been challenging the code and conduct of a contemporary furniture industry still mired in Modernist convention and the bottom-line economic model of often-disjointed mass manufacturing. Defined by a reinterpretation and revitalization of age-old craft techniques, the provocateur has carved, sand-cast, molded, and folded an approach all his own: one predicated on finding fresh applications for salvaged components and those unexpected natural elements no one before him deemed suitable.
For Lamb—like Augustus Pugin and the proponents of the Arts and Crafts movement—aesthetics, and perhaps also function, should always be the outcome of making and reflective of the inherent properties of the materials incorporated. This career-defining proposition is fundamentally sustainable. Little processing or adulteration is necessary.
A lot of that results in roughly hewn formations—rock settees where the function of sitting is just barely decipherable—but that isn’t always the case in Lamb’s work. Take the long-developed Economy Chair, now called the Min Chair. In this design, pinewood beams, all in the same dimension, are carefully cut at just the right angle and fitted together in an exacting and bold assembly. The approach is as rudimentary as it is hyper-engineered.
Put into serial production by innovative Swedish brand Hem—translating a self-build logic into a scalable model—the Min Chair is the result of intensive trial and error: research into attaining maximum character with minimal means. There’s no extraneous energy exerted in systematically cutting and assembling the modular components, and so, in turn, no superfluous decorative detail is added. The design is unabashedly sculptural but also straightforward in ontologically self-communicating its purpose, deftly turning the Modernist tenet of form following function on its head.
“This is an exciting continuation of our work with Max,” says Petrus Palmér, Hem founder and CEO. He and his team have collaborated with Lamb since beginning to develop his Last Stool product in the early 2010s. Hem works with a tight roster of talents, ones it has returned to time and again over the years. “As editor, our role was to bring this iteration into production without compromising the idea.”
To see this and other works by the designer, visit maxlamb.org.
Photography by Erik Lefvander.
