Macramé meets high-tech. By a surprising marriage of handcraft and industrial technology this lightweight chair is born.
The rope made of an aramide braid and carbon centre is knotted into the shape of a chair. The slack texture is then impregnated with epoxy and hung in a frame to harden. Gaudi revisited: gravity creates the final shape. The transparent appearance of the chair misleads you, the knotted fibre, which doesn’t want to collapse looks strange, alien perhaps. The chair invites to touch and try. Despite all his modern technology he has a lovely doltishness, which bring out it’s individual and personal character. Some products are a forerunner, a come out to new inventions, materials and technology. The knotted chair is such a product. Jury-report Rotterdam design prize 1997, ‘Knotted Chair’ by Marcel Wanders appeals to the imagination because it realizes the designer’s age-old dream: making something soft and flat become rigid and three-dimensional by means of a couple of technical inventions. Moreover he rescues the traditionally pure, practical and constructive macramé technique from stuffy image that it has had since the Sixties by linking it up with the latest technology. The knotted chair is selected and presented for the Cappellini Collection. The Museum of Modern Art New York amongst many others buys the chair. The Chair won the prize of the public of the Rotterdam design prize and Wanders won the Kho Liang I incentive prize for industrial design with it.
Material: aramide carbon rope, epoxy
Dimensions: 72 x 56 cm x D: 65 cm (h x w x d)
Design: 1996
Produced by: Cappellini
Designed by: MARCEL WANDERS
They stopped producing the chair in 2011 (after a 1000 of them were made) and since then it has been part of the Personal Editions collection. The Knotted Chair sits within the perminant collections of such museums as the V&A London, MoMA NY and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
www.marcelwanders.nl/products/seating/knotted-chair
www.cappellini.it
MARCEL WANDERS
Born in Boxtel, the Netherlands in 1963, Marcel Wanders developed his experience in the design field first in Droog Design, then with Wanders Wonders brand, and currently with Moooi. He collaborates with Authentics, Flos, Magis, Mandarina Duck, and Salviati. Impulsive and always enthusiastic, he creates delicate and light objects as naturally as technology became second nature for the human race. Marcel Wanders believes it is important to learn about materials, to know what they can do, how they are produced and how they are processed, and in this way he creates his projects through a synthesis of handicraft and industrial technology.
www.cappellini.it/en/designer/marcel-wanders
