November 2010 • In Production
Bending the Rules
Osko + Deichmann’s kinked, playful Straw chair
By Belinda Lanks
MANUFACTURER: Blå Station
www.blastation.com
HEIGHT: 33.3 inches
SEAT HEIGHT: 18.5 inches
WIDTH: 18.7 inches
DEPTH: 15.7 inches
Last year, on the occasion of the Bauhaus’s 90th anniversary, the German designers Oliver Deichmann and Blasius Osko decided to pay homage to one of the movement’s iconic pieces of furniture: the tubular-steel cantilever chair by Mart Stam (or Marcel Breuer, depending on whom you ask). While the designers maintained the original’s challenging form, they broke the metal tubes instead of shaping them into smooth curves. “Normally, a kink is considered to be a damaged tube, like it has lost its structural integrity,” Deichmann says, “but we found a special kind of forty-five-degree kink, which made the cantilever possible.”
In the process, the designers fell in love with the “imperfection” and resolved to incorporate it into a seat all their own. The Straw chair, which won the Forum + 1 Award at the Stockholm Furniture Fair this year, combines the steel construction that revolutionized the furniture industry in the 1920s with an ele-ment of craft: it is made partly by hand rather than by machine. “We like the contradiction,” Deichmann says. “The whole move-ment of modernity tried to bring the process of industrialized production into furniture, and now you have the opposite movement of people who are trying to bring craft back into furniture production.” Here, Deichmann, one half of Osko + Deichmann, talks about the design, which is also available as a lounge chair and can be purchased from Blå Station.
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This is the most basic way to deform a tube. You can just take a regular vise and crack a dent, then fold it by hand.
It’s inspired by playing with a cocktail straw and being able to make all of these little figures with it. We wanted to show the easiness of making a steel chair and give something that is usually visually heavy a lighter appearance.
The kinked spots are a little bit weaker than if you had a typical bend, so you have to reinforce the structure around it. With the crossbars, it looks almost like a very iconic wooden chair. We wanted to have a very simple outer shape, so all the spice comes from the kink.
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