Tag Archives: Chair

This Printer-shaped Chair Has Receipts… Literally!

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Somewhere along the way, the internet decided that “receipts” means proof. Screenshots of your ex’s texts are receipts. That old tweet a celebrity forgot to delete is a receipt. Muddycap, the anonymous South Korean designer who keeps turning random objects into chairs, has gone back to the original meaning and made one you can sit on. Or at least imagine sitting on. The Receipt Chair is a thermal receipt printer blown up to armchair size, and the paper spitting out of it is your backrest. Consider this my receipt for being a lifelong Muddycap fan.

Like much of Muddycap’s work, the chair is a 3D render, and it’s convincing enough that you’ll double-check. The details come straight from the black POS printers sitting at checkout counters across America. A glossy shell forms the armrests, one of which hides the paper roll behind a smoked window, while a leather-look cushion fills the seat. The charcoal base gets vents, a rocker power switch, and little green and red LEDs. Up top, the receipt rolls out in a big white loop with a blurred-out total, a barcode, and MUDDYCAP CHAIRS printed across the bottom. I’m choosing to believe the total is blurred because the price would make me faint.

Designer: Muddycap

Countertop thermal printers like Epson’s TM-T20 are designed to sit beside a register and vanish into the background, all matte black plastic, a flip-up lid, and a paper slot. Nobody buys one for its looks. Muddycap keeps those utilitarian details, including the parts a chair has zero use for. The vents, the switch, and the two status lights do nothing for your backside, yet they’re why your brain reads “printer” a split second before it reads “chair.”

As a seat, the proportions look generous. The deep, low cushion and tall armrests suggest a club chair for sinking in with a drink rather than sitting upright with a laptop. Thermal paper naturally curls off the roll, and Muddycap uses that curl as a reclined backrest that rises behind your shoulders before sweeping over toward the paper bay. A real version might use molded polypropylene or thin powder-coated steel to recreate that curve, though the renders don’t establish how it would be built. The loop hangs well behind the seat, so this looks like a terrible wall-hugger.

Designers have been turning everyday objects into seating for decades. Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni turned a tractor seat into the Mezzadro stool in 1957, and Studio65 turned a pair of lips into the Bocca sofa in 1970. Muddycap plays the same game with a digital-era twist, building a running series of chairs out of the gadgets and interfaces we stare at all day. His Low Battery Chair turned your phone’s most stressful icon into seating, and a three-seater shaped like a mixing-desk fader borrowed its form from audio gear. The Receipt Chair fits right in, celebrating the piece of paper your Apple Pay tap can still produce.

Hypebeast once profiled Muddycap under a headline about chairs that can’t be sat on, and he has talked about eventually producing some of his designs. If this one ever makes the jump, I already know where it belongs: right by the checkout lanes of a big-box store, where tired shoppers waiting on a price check can finally sit down. Until then, the renders live on his Instagram.

The post This Printer-shaped Chair Has Receipts… Literally! first appeared on Yanko Design.

Old Chairs Get a Resin Shell Without Hiding Their Scars

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Darkened wood, uneven color, and exposed fasteners are hardly the usual ingredients of a furniture makeover. In Younghyun Lee’s The Youth, they’re the reason to look closer. The series takes on a familiar problem: old furniture can lose our interest long before its materials lose their character. Rather than erase the evidence of use, Lee gives discarded chairs and aged timber a different visual identity, with their earlier lives still visible.

The intervention is resin, applied around the wooden components to create new forms and proportions. In the supplied photographs, cloudy, translucent edges surround the darker timber, making each piece look suspended inside a larger version of itself. These are exhibition works, not a practical repair kit for a wobbly dining chair. Their contribution is more specific: they make the material we might overlook worth examining again, without requiring it to look freshly manufactured.

Designer: Younghyun Lee

I like how much of the transformation happens at the edges. The resin extends beyond the wood, giving the uprights broader outlines and the horizontal rails gently dipping contours. From a distance, the chair has an almost frosted appearance. Closer views reveal the irregular wooden surfaces inside. That difference in viewing distance matters. You register the pale silhouette first, then discover that the brown structure within it looks considerably older and less orderly.

The hardware adds another layer of interest. Dark fasteners remain visible along the uprights, interrupting the pale resin borders. They give the object a slightly stubborn, workshop quality that keeps the treatment from becoming too precious. Cover those details completely and the wood might read as decorative filler. Leaving them legible lets the viewer recognize pieces of an actual assembly, with connections and wear that weren’t invented simply to make a photograph more appealing.

There’s an important catch in the photographed example: the seat area is open. I wouldn’t describe it as a replacement for the chair at your kitchen table. That absence changes the encounter, because the familiar outline invites recognition while the missing sitting surface interrupts the expected use. For me, it works better understood as a chair-based sculpture. You can consider its shape and construction without having to pretend the pictures establish anything about comfort.

The name, The Youth, feels particularly apt once you notice how much aging remains on display. Earlier coverage describes Lee’s project as an exploration of memories carried by old objects, including scratches and faded marks. My reading is that youth here has less to do with reversing time than with finding another possibility. The wood doesn’t become young again. Its changed surroundings give us a reason to pay attention to it differently.

Presented as part of The Nuance, Lee’s solo exhibition at KiNN in Seoul, the series benefits from being encountered beyond the workbench. In the supplied installation photographs, the pale resin picks up the brightness of the surrounding room while the timber remains a darker presence within it. The effect makes the chair look a little ghostly, although its frame and visible hardware keep it from disappearing into atmosphere. It still looks like an object somebody assembled.

I’d be cautious about turning that appeal into an automatic sustainability claim. Reclaimed wood is part of the story, but I don’t need a sweeping environmental promise to appreciate this particular material decision. The more convincing achievement is visible: the resin changes the object substantially while allowing the original components to remain recognizable. That’s a more interesting relationship than treating old wood as anonymous raw material, stripped of everything that made this particular piece different.

My favorite detail is the uneven color still showing through the pale borders. It gives the eye somewhere to linger after the initial surprise of the resin wears off. I wouldn’t want every battered chair encased this way, but Lee makes a persuasive case for this one. The marks that might otherwise count against it are now precisely what I’d want to keep looking at.

The post Old Chairs Get a Resin Shell Without Hiding Their Scars first appeared on Yanko Design.

Old Chairs Get a Resin Shell Without Hiding Their Scars

Posted on by

Darkened wood, uneven color, and exposed fasteners are hardly the usual ingredients of a furniture makeover. In Younghyun Lee’s The Youth, they’re the reason to look closer. The series takes on a familiar problem: old furniture can lose our interest long before its materials lose their character. Rather than erase the evidence of use, Lee gives discarded chairs and aged timber a different visual identity, with their earlier lives still visible.

The intervention is resin, applied around the wooden components to create new forms and proportions. In the supplied photographs, cloudy, translucent edges surround the darker timber, making each piece look suspended inside a larger version of itself. These are exhibition works, not a practical repair kit for a wobbly dining chair. Their contribution is more specific: they make the material we might overlook worth examining again, without requiring it to look freshly manufactured.

Designer: Younghyun Lee

I like how much of the transformation happens at the edges. The resin extends beyond the wood, giving the uprights broader outlines and the horizontal rails gently dipping contours. From a distance, the chair has an almost frosted appearance. Closer views reveal the irregular wooden surfaces inside. That difference in viewing distance matters. You register the pale silhouette first, then discover that the brown structure within it looks considerably older and less orderly.

The hardware adds another layer of interest. Dark fasteners remain visible along the uprights, interrupting the pale resin borders. They give the object a slightly stubborn, workshop quality that keeps the treatment from becoming too precious. Cover those details completely and the wood might read as decorative filler. Leaving them legible lets the viewer recognize pieces of an actual assembly, with connections and wear that weren’t invented simply to make a photograph more appealing.

There’s an important catch in the photographed example: the seat area is open. I wouldn’t describe it as a replacement for the chair at your kitchen table. That absence changes the encounter, because the familiar outline invites recognition while the missing sitting surface interrupts the expected use. For me, it works better understood as a chair-based sculpture. You can consider its shape and construction without having to pretend the pictures establish anything about comfort.

The name, The Youth, feels particularly apt once you notice how much aging remains on display. Earlier coverage describes Lee’s project as an exploration of memories carried by old objects, including scratches and faded marks. My reading is that youth here has less to do with reversing time than with finding another possibility. The wood doesn’t become young again. Its changed surroundings give us a reason to pay attention to it differently.

Presented as part of The Nuance, Lee’s solo exhibition at KiNN in Seoul, the series benefits from being encountered beyond the workbench. In the supplied installation photographs, the pale resin picks up the brightness of the surrounding room while the timber remains a darker presence within it. The effect makes the chair look a little ghostly, although its frame and visible hardware keep it from disappearing into atmosphere. It still looks like an object somebody assembled.

I’d be cautious about turning that appeal into an automatic sustainability claim. Reclaimed wood is part of the story, but I don’t need a sweeping environmental promise to appreciate this particular material decision. The more convincing achievement is visible: the resin changes the object substantially while allowing the original components to remain recognizable. That’s a more interesting relationship than treating old wood as anonymous raw material, stripped of everything that made this particular piece different.

My favorite detail is the uneven color still showing through the pale borders. It gives the eye somewhere to linger after the initial surprise of the resin wears off. I wouldn’t want every battered chair encased this way, but Lee makes a persuasive case for this one. The marks that might otherwise count against it are now precisely what I’d want to keep looking at.

The post Old Chairs Get a Resin Shell Without Hiding Their Scars first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Hidden Mechanism Turns the Scissor Chair Into a Lounger

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Buying a chair for conversation and buying one for an evening with a book can feel like two separate furniture decisions. One asks you to sit up; the other invites you to sink back. If your living room doesn’t have space for both, the Scissor Chair offers an appealing compromise. Produced by the German company Wilhelm Knoll, this mid-century design changes its sitting position while keeping the appearance of an ordinary upholstered armchair. Its designer remains unknown, but the problem it addresses is familiar.

The name gives away the basic geometry. According to a vintage dealer’s description, lifting the armrests allows the crossed legs to unfold. The chair moves between a taller, more upright configuration and a lower lounging position. Instead of leaving the legs stationary while only the backrest moves, the transformation changes the stance of the chair itself. I like that the supporting structure participates in the adjustment. Those wooden legs have a job beyond providing a handsome silhouette.

Designer: Unknown (produced by Wilhelm Knoll)

In photographs of a cream-upholstered example, the narrow wooden arms trace an open shape around the seat and back. There’s plenty of air beneath the upholstery, and the legs remain visually separate rather than disappearing inside a boxy base. In the upright position, it looks quite composed. Lowered, the crossed supports become more obvious, and the chair takes on a relaxed, backward-leaning posture. The useful surprise is how little visual fuss accompanies that change.

The adjustment is more substantial than a slight tilt. One dealer lists seat heights of 45 and 36 centimeters for an example, roughly 18 and 14 inches. That’s a difference of about three and a half inches, enough to make these visibly different seating arrangements. Those are seller-provided measurements for a vintage piece, rather than a universal specification, but they help explain the appeal. You’re choosing between two distinct positions, with different relationships to the floor and surrounding furniture.

Underneath, the mechanism is considerably busier than the silhouette suggests. A dealer’s underside photograph reveals pivoting metal links, brackets, and a coil spring tucked between the wooden supports. I’d happily leave that view to someone servicing it. From a design perspective, though, the separation makes sense: the mechanical assembly sits beneath the upholstered seat, where it can do its work without dictating the appearance of every surface above it. The chair doesn’t need to look like workshop equipment to have moving parts.

For a smaller living room, I see the attraction as flexibility rather than some miraculous recovery of square footage. A chair that changes posture still needs room around it, especially when its stance changes. The more convincing benefit is having one seat that can suit a conversation and then offer a lower position for unwinding. That’s a modest promise, and a useful one. I’d rather have two clearly differentiated options than an elaborate transformation with no obvious purpose.

The Knoll name deserves a little care here. Wilhelm Knoll was a German business whose roots go back to a Stuttgart leather shop founded in 1865. It shouldn’t be casually confused with the American company Hans Knoll established in 1938, although the businesses share family history. Vintage dealers date Scissor Chair examples to the 1950s. Keeping the manufacturer credit separate from the unidentified designer matters, particularly with an object whose mechanism deserves more attention than a famous surname alone.

Of course, photographs can’t tell me how smoothly a surviving example adjusts or how supportive it feels after an hour. With a vintage moving chair, I’d want the mechanism demonstrated and its condition checked before buying. That practical reservation doesn’t diminish the idea. The Scissor Chair appeals to me because its cleverness is so specific: lift the arms, alter the stance, settle into a different position. A living room doesn’t always need another chair. Sometimes the chair already there could simply offer another way to sit.

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Aery’s Office Chair Offers a Fit You Can Actually Fine-Tune

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A desk setup can look perfect and still feel wrong by lunch. The monitor is aligned, the cables are hidden, and the chair matches the room, yet you’re shuffling around trying to get comfortable. That gap between a workspace that photographs well and one that fits the person using it is the more interesting design problem to me. It’s where EFFYDESK’s Aery Ergonomic Chair makes its case.

For anyone whose office occupies a bedroom corner or shares space with the living room, choosing a chair involves a negotiation. You want something you can spend time in, but you also have to look at it after closing the laptop. The Aery approaches that compromise with a mesh back, a cushioned seat, and adjustments that let its proportions work around the person sitting in it.

Designer: effydesk

The mesh is doing some of the visual work here. A tall upholstered back can become a fairly imposing presence beside a small desk. With the Aery, the open surface allows the supporting structure to remain visible, breaking up what could otherwise read as one large block. It still looks like an office chair, especially with that separate headrest, but its outline has a little breathing room.

I appreciate that it doesn’t try to disguise its purpose. In black, the frame, armrests, and cushion form a straightforward piece of working furniture. It isn’t pretending to be a dining chair you could drag into a meeting. That distinction matters in a home office, where choosing something purely for the room’s aesthetic can leave you making compromises every time you sit down.

The fabric-covered cushion gives the design a softer counterpoint to the mesh back. It also offers a combination that may appeal to people who prefer padding beneath them without wanting an upholstered surface behind their entire torso. I like the visual balance between the two. The seat gives the chair some substance, while the open back keeps that substance from extending all the way upward.

The most useful adjustment is also one of the least visually dramatic: the seat slides forward and backward. Rather than changing the chair’s appearance in any meaningful way, it changes how the cushion sits beneath your legs. That’s worth paying attention to if you’ve ever loved the look of a chair but found yourself perched near its edge because sitting all the way back didn’t feel right.

The movable armrests follow the same thinking. They adjust in height, slide in different directions, and rotate, giving you some freedom to place the supports where your arms naturally rest. The appeal is less about collecting adjustment options than avoiding a fixed position that doesn’t suit you. A chair’s silhouette can look perfectly balanced while its armrests feel entirely wrong for the person using it.

The headrest and reclining back introduce a more relaxed posture into the design. I see the appeal for reading through a document or leaning back between tasks, particularly when the desk is where several parts of your day happen. Still, the headrest feels secondary to getting the seat and arms right. Those are the relationships you live with while doing the work.

I haven’t sat in the Aery, so its cushion comfort and the feel of its controls remain open questions. Images and adjustment lists can explain the design, but they can’t tell me whether an armrest stays put when I want it to. That’s what I’d want to check in person, along with how naturally the chair fits beneath my desk.

What appeals to me is how much of the Aery’s design can be put to an everyday use. The mesh changes its visual presence; the cushion changes the sitting surface; the adjustments offer room to work out a better fit. It gives a home-office buyer reasons to look beyond the styled photograph, while still acknowledging that the chair has to live in the room.

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This Convertible Bench Lets You Choose Between Company and Privacy

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Cities are designed around togetherness. Parks, campuses, transit hubs, waiting areas, and public plazas usually assume that people want to sit near one another, talk, observe, or participate in the energy around them. What these spaces often overlook is the opposite need. Sometimes people simply want a few minutes of separation without having to leave the public realm entirely. CONVERTIBLE, a multifunctional privacy chair by industrial designer Ümithan Üçok, begins with that contradiction and turns it into a piece of adaptable public furniture.

The project combines two familiar furniture types that usually serve very different social behaviors: the public bench and the privacy chair. Instead of deciding that a space must support either interaction or isolation, CONVERTIBLE allows the same object to accommodate both. At first glance, it functions as shared seating, maintaining the openness expected from furniture placed in communal environments. Its form can then be reconfigured to create a more enclosed seating condition, giving one person a stronger sense of personal territory.

Designer:  Ümithan ÜÇOK

That shift feels increasingly relevant to contemporary urban life. Public space has become densely programmed around movement and interaction, while opportunities for temporary retreat are much harder to find. Privacy usually requires entering a building, booking a room, going home, or withdrawing completely from the surroundings. CONVERTIBLE proposes something less absolute. It allows a person to remain present within a shared environment while establishing a temporary boundary around themselves.

This is what makes the chair more interesting than a conventional privacy pod. Its purpose is not permanent isolation. Privacy becomes a condition that can appear and disappear according to the person using it. The furniture responds to changing behavior rather than prescribing one specific way of sitting. Someone could use it openly while meeting a friend, waiting between appointments, or taking a break. The same seating element could later become a more sheltered place for reading, working, making a phone call, or simply spending some time alone.

There is also an important spatial advantage to combining these functions. Public furniture usually has to justify the area it occupies, especially in places where space is limited. Providing separate benches and separate privacy seating can quickly make an environment crowded or inefficient. A convertible object allows the same footprint to serve different needs at different moments. Its multifunctionality therefore becomes more than a visual gesture. It gives planners and designers a way to make public seating more flexible without filling the environment with additional furniture.

The project also raises a quieter question about what privacy actually means in a public setting. Privacy does not always require a sealed room or complete visual separation. A shift in orientation, a surrounding surface, or a clearly defined personal zone can be enough to change how exposed someone feels. By moving between bench and privacy chair, CONVERTIBLE uses furniture itself to create that psychological distinction.

Üçok’s project is ultimately built around a simple observation: people do not behave socially all the time. Our need for connection changes throughout the day, and the spaces around us rarely change with it. CONVERTIBLE gives that change a physical form. Instead of treating public seating as a fixed object with a fixed purpose, it imagines furniture as something that can negotiate between openness and withdrawal, allowing the same public space to feel communal one moment and personal the next.

That flexibility matters because public life is rarely one mood for long. A plaza, campus, or waiting area has to hold conversation, observation, work, and quiet retreat, often within the same hour and the same footprint. By letting one object move between shared bench and privacy chair, CONVERTIBLE treats those shifts as ordinary rather than exceptional. It does not solve urban loneliness or overcrowding on its own, but it does suggest a more responsive kind of public furniture: seating that can stay open when company is welcome, and close in just enough when someone needs a moment alone.

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This VR System Gets Bigger So It Doesn’t Have to Touch Your Face

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Virtual reality often asks you to strap a screen to your face before you can go anywhere. That can get uncomfortable when a short demonstration turns into a long session. Researchers at Kyushu University tried moving the display off your head and onto a chair instead, surrounding the seated user with an optical pod that offers a three-dimensional view without a headset.

The prototype looks more like a piece of oversized furniture than goggles and controllers. A high-backed seat supports your body, while a large white enclosure projects forward around your field of view. Its bulk might seem surprising for a system intended to reduce discomfort, but that weight belongs to the structure, not your forehead, cheeks, or neck during a session.

Designer: Shogo Fukushima (Kyushu University)

Inside, a micromirror array directs slightly different images to each eye, creating depth without placing lenses against your face. Aerial imaging makes the scene appear to float beyond the chair rather than sit on a screen inches away. That gives you something closer to looking into a space than staring at a monitor, even though the machinery stays right where you’re seated.

The chair itself becomes part of the controls. A gyroscope follows its rotation, so turning your body changes what you see in the virtual scene. You don’t have to wear a tracker on your head or adjust a headset each time someone else takes a turn. Sit down, face the optics, and the system can respond to a swivel as you look around.

Imagine a museum where visitors take turns exploring a reconstruction without sharing something that rests against their faces. A seat could offer a brief journey, then welcome the next person without the ritual of fitting and removing goggles. The same approach might suit a stationary operator examining a remote workspace, although neither setting has been demonstrated as a finished installation.

Putting the optics in furniture also changes what designers can do with their size. Bigger components don’t have to balance on someone’s nose, leaving room to experiment with a broader view or different moving mechanisms. The researchers suggest that this freedom might eventually help address VR sickness, but it hasn’t been shown to prevent nausea. Less head pressure and less motion sickness are two different promises.

There are obvious trade-offs. You can’t walk around while using a chair-bound system, and the current prototype occupies far more room than a headset you can put in a drawer. It’s designed around seated rotation, not every little turn of your head, so it shouldn’t be mistaken for an equivalent replacement for mobile VR.

Still, the chair asks a question about who should carry the weight of immersion. Instead of shrinking everything until it fits on your face, it lets the room hold the hardware and leaves your head alone. For someone spending an afternoon inside a simulated environment, that shift could matter more than another reduction in headset weight, provided the chair itself proves comfortable.

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Flat-Pack Furniture That Actually Survives Your Next Move

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Flat-pack furniture is easy to appreciate on the day it arrives. It fits through the door, and you can usually put it together without much help. The harder test comes later: can it survive a move, come apart cleanly, or be repaired when something goes wrong? FLAT/FORM, a collection by designer Satoshi Itasaka of h220430, is built around those questions. Its pieces use bolts and nuts so they can be assembled, disassembled, repaired, and transported again.

That might sound like a modest ambition, but it changes how I look at the furniture. A dining chair is rarely a one-time purchase for a single room. It may follow you through different apartments, sit beside several tables, and get carried up more stairs than you care to count. FLAT/FORM treats that ongoing life as part of the design brief, rather than leaving it to chance after the first assembly.

Designer: h220430

The material gives the project its character. FLAT/FORM uses 15-millimeter-thick veneer panels made from Japanese cedar trees more than 100 years old, with timber supplied by Miyazaki-based forestry company GROWTHRING. A dining chair and a low table are among the pieces in the collection. Both start from flat panels, a straightforward idea that lets the wood grain do some of the visual work while the construction remains easy to understand.

I like that balance. The collection does not try to disguise how it is made. Its flat planes and visible connections make assembly feel like a considered feature, not an awkward step between opening a box and enjoying the result. That distinction matters because a piece can be visually quiet without feeling anonymous. Here, the simple construction gives the furniture a recognizable point of view, while leaving room for the cedar to be the thing you notice first.

The choice of older cedar also invites a little care in how we talk about the project. Wood with a compelling history does not automatically make a product sustainable, and a furniture collection cannot solve every problem associated with consumption. What FLAT/FORM can offer is a more specific proposition: furniture intended to come apart, travel, and be repaired instead of being treated as finished when its first arrangement stops working. That seems more useful to me than a sweeping environmental promise.

There is a practical kindness to that approach. Moving is already expensive and tiring; furniture should not add a puzzle you are afraid to solve twice. Bolts and nuts are familiar hardware, and the collection’s assembly system is intended to make disassembly possible. None of that guarantees that every move will be effortless. It does mean the designer has acknowledged that people relocate and rearrange their lives, and that a chair ought to have some chance of keeping up.

I would still want to sit in the dining chair before making any grand claims about it. Photographs can tell you plenty about proportion and material, but not how a seat feels through a long dinner. Nor does an elegant assembly concept tell you what the collection costs or how its surfaces will age in a busy home. Those are fair questions for any furniture meant to last, particularly furniture whose appeal rests partly on the idea of keeping it around.

Even with those questions open, FLAT/FORM feels refreshing because it gives flat-pack design a different priority. Convenience at delivery is helpful, but convenience at every stage afterward may be the better measure. A table that can leave one home and settle into another without becoming a burden has a value that is easy to overlook when shopping by appearance alone. Itasaka’s collection makes that overlooked part of ownership visible.

Perhaps that is the quietest, strongest idea here: furniture should be allowed to have a future. FLAT/FORM does not need to look complicated to make that point. It uses flat cedar panels and ordinary fasteners to ask a sensible question of a familiar category: what if getting a piece into your home were only the beginning of a good design? That is a question worth asking before the next box arrives at the door.

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A 1908 New York building’s discarded fragments got turned into furniture instead of being demolished

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A renovation across the street from Rafael Prieto’s studio offered an unusually good view of his next project. As decorative pieces came off the facade of a Tribeca building, he arranged to save sixteen that were headed for disposal. Most of us would have watched the scaffolding go up and returned to our emails. Prieto, a Mexico-born designer and creative director based in Tribeca, had other ideas. The result is a furniture exhibition that keeps the building’s ornament alive in some very unexpected forms.

Prieto spent time with the fragments before turning them into the starting point for tables, chairs, and sculptural objects. Weathered ornament sits against painted birch, sometimes tucked inside a crisp new frame. The resulting furniture keeps its New York address close, even when its shape heads somewhere unexpected. Some pieces carry the actual stone; others borrow only its curves, grooves, and proportions. It is a show that rewards looking twice.

Designer: Rafael Prieto

The building across the street is 366 Broadway, now known as Collect Pond House, a twelve-story Beaux-Arts structure designed by Frederick C. Browne in 1908. It was once home to the Royal Typewriter Company, then became a residential co-op in 1979. The facade is densely ornamented: copper cornices, Greek key detailing, marble columns, and keystones carved into bearded faces that have been watching Tribeca change for over a century. A recent multi-year restoration replaced and conserved 65 terra cotta units. A handful of the pieces removed during that process did not make it back onto the building.

Before cutting anything, Prieto lived with the fragments in his studio for roughly a year and a half. He photographed and scanned each contour and ornament, then layered those images to pull out shapes and combinations that could inform new work. That process produced a design vocabulary rather than any direct copy of the originals. The stepped, ribbed profiles that climb the legs of the red lacquered chair came directly from this translation, somewhere between column fluting and abstracted skyline. It is a method closer to archaeology than furniture-making.

One of the standout pieces has a large carved stone cornice block sitting below a flat black painted tabletop, doing actual structural work. The stone is pale, dense, and loaded with repeating scroll forms, carrying roughly a century of New York weather on its surface. Another piece cages a smaller fragment between vertical black bars inside a cube-shaped form, the stone visible through the gaps like something on display. The medium listing for several works at the gallery confirms “Architectural Fragment” as a named material alongside painted birch. Not every piece carries original stone; some borrow only its shapes.

The all-red lacquered chair is the most confident piece in the show, its legs built from stacked, stepped planes that scanning and layering pulled from 366 Broadway’s fluted piers and molded profiles. Its natural birch counterpart deploys the same vocabulary in warm wood, swapping lacquer for grain and adding red geometric arm brackets at the joints. A console table makes the argument most literally: one end sits on a fabricated red plinth, the other rests on an actual salvaged Ionic stone volute, intact and weather-stained. The two supports are not supposed to match. The gallery describes this contrast as the central thread: the hard and the soft, the historic and the contemporary, running through every piece.

Several of the original keystones sit on the gallery floor unaltered, including one carved bearded face in a plumed helmet still stained with moss and a century of city air. Prieto’s analog photography wraps the walls in large-scale architectural murals, produced in collaboration with Wallpaper Projects. The room ends up feeling closer to a photographed ruin than a white-cube gallery, which is entirely the point. He told Family Style that “New York is its architecture,” and that most people talk about the skyline but “don’t look up.” The show does the looking for you.

‘The Future of the Past’ is Prieto’s second solo show with Emma Scully Gallery and runs through December 12 at the Upper East Side location, open Wednesday through Saturday. Pricing and availability are through the gallery directly. The question the collection keeps circling is whether furniture shaped by a building’s discarded ornament carries any of that building’s memory with it. Prieto does not seem interested in settling that question cleanly. The bearded face on the gallery floor looks like he has made his peace with the whole situation.

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Sheet Metal Furniture That Actually Survives Your Next Move

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Anyone who has hauled a flat-pack bookshelf up three flights of stairs knows the routine. You unbox forty identical-looking parts, squint at a wordless instruction sheet, and by hour two you’re gripping an Allen key like it personally wronged you. A year later, the particleboard swells near a window, a screw strips out, and the whole thing wobbles until it ends up on a curb with a “free” sign taped to it. That has quietly been the trade-off behind affordable, shippable furniture for decades: cheap to move, disposable by design.

Turkish industrial designer Gokce Nafak seems to have grown impatient with that compromise, and her two newest pieces, Platea and Vault, treat sheet metal the way most brands treat particleboard, except the metal actually holds up. Both pack flat, both go together without a booklet the size of a novel, and neither one pretends that easy shipping has to mean a short lifespan.

Designer: Gokce Nafak

Platea started life as a stool and side table built from four sheet metal components, cut with CNC lasers and shaped on a press brake, then flat-packed for shipping and assembled by hand. No adhesive, no particleboard dust, no hardware bag with three mystery screws left over. The pieces slot together with the kind of tolerances that only come from someone who has spent real time thinking about how metal bends and where it wants to meet itself. It reads as a stool first, but the same frame doubles as a side table, which matters more than it sounds like it should when you’re trying to furnish a small apartment without buying five single-purpose objects.

Vault pushes the same idea into seating. It’s built from three primary metal components and leans further into an industrial look, exposed edges, visible seams, a silhouette that doesn’t try to soften what it’s made of. Where a lot of furniture hides its construction under upholstery and veneer, Vault puts it on display. I like that choice. It treats the manufacturing process as part of the design language instead of something to disguise, which feels closer to what flat-pack furniture was supposed to be in the first place, before it became shorthand for flimsy.

The bigger problem both designs are quietly answering is one that anyone who’s moved apartments in the last few years understands instinctively. Furniture shipping is expensive, bulky, and wasteful, and most of what’s marketed as a solution just swaps cardboard for landfill a couple of years later. Metal doesn’t swell in humidity, doesn’t sag under weight the way particleboard does, and it can actually be recycled instead of shrugged off as trash. A flat-pack chair that’s built to survive more than one move is not a small thing when you consider how much of the furniture industry still runs on the assumption that people will replace what they buy.

There’s also a design argument here that goes beyond function. Minimalist industrial pieces like these work in a rental unit, a studio, or a full house without looking like they were chosen for any one of those settings specifically. They don’t ask a room to organize itself around them. That kind of flexibility used to belong almost exclusively to expensive, custom furniture, and seeing it show up in something built to ship flat and assemble by hand feels like a genuine shift rather than a gimmick.

None of this means Platea and Vault will replace the big-box flat-pack aisle overnight. But they make a decent case that shippable furniture doesn’t have to be throwaway furniture, and that a designer working with sheet metal and a laser cutter can say more about honesty in manufacturing than most brands manage with an entire marketing campaign. That’s worth paying attention to, especially for anyone who’s tired of furniture that only looks good until the first move.

The post Sheet Metal Furniture That Actually Survives Your Next Move first appeared on Yanko Design.