Max Lamb

Traceability may be an important question when buying food, or ordering from a restaurant but with furniture we are much less concerned by this. Designer Max Lamb might not have intentionally set out to redefine this in furniture, but his short time-lapse films show the materials used and how each piece was made.

Courtesy americancraftmag.org

As he told Dezeen in 2009 “My furniture is very personal; people only buy it if they respond emotionally, so they’re unlikely to throw it away. Lifespan and the relationship between an item and its user are more important than so-called ecological materials. It’s the culture of disposal that I think we need to address. The materials and processes I use are very durable – you can be very rough with them. And I don’t follow fashion.”

This rings nicely in my ears as I think about the objects I own and what matters to me when I buy pieces… ‘will it last?’, ‘how was it made?’ and ‘will it grow on me or against me?’. Max works to help answer these questions.

How to make a Fritz Hansen’s Series 7 chair

I have posted about chairs many times over but it is the defining moment for most designers… to try their hand to such a challenging object. It is not as simple as a vase which needs to perform but stay in shape, or a lamp which has to look beautiful both on and off; a chair on the other hand has to perform as an object and be comfortable to sit in, often for long periods of time… and then last for years.

It is no wonder that few chairs make it into the history books but Arne Jacobsen’s Series 7 has done so it is no wonder that Fritz Hansen took time to capture it’s beauty in film…

Found via huffingtonpost.com and core77.com

Constructing Eames

I heart handmade. There, I said it. Well, not a big surprise really after appearing on the Etsy blog a few months back. So, on my usual browse of the Etsy blog for their delicious imagery and well-researched stories I stumbled across a story on ‘Assembling the Eames Lounge Chair‘.

I am a bit of a design-snob and often disregard the Eames lounge chair as overexposed. It has almost made a mockery of itself. But watching this video made me remember everything I thought when I first saw one and sat in it. The quality is perfect and rivals most of its competition, standing the true test of good design…time!

Do watch this video for some exquisite close-ups of an Eames lounge chair being assembled by Vitra…