More Chairs from Martino Gamper
by Bonnie Alter, London on 03.20.08
Martino Gamper was the man who designed and built a 100 chairs in a hundred days, all from recycled and found bits and pieces from the streets. Amazingly all one hundred have now been sold to a Milanese art gallery. The show was also nominated for a Brit Insurance Design of the Year Award.
Now he has a new idea for a chair exercise: he has created 25 chairs using a combination of the same components for each one. There are 12 different components in three different kinds of timber. He didn't pre-draw any of them; the design and construction were improvised during the making. Each chair is a natural evolution of the one before and has its own character.
The table is also a design exercise: made of 13 off-cuts from a mixture of teak reclaimed from English school laboratory desks, oak from Scottish church benches and poplar from the London Patent Office. It is put together in a horseshoe shape which is intimate yet grand. It is all part of Total Trattoria, an event where every item, from silverware to coasters, is designed by Gamper and friends. Glass water jugs look like plastic water bottles and carafes look like candleholders, the lamp shades were made of flatbreads. Some of the show is for sale, others part of the installation. :: The Aram Gallery
