Wood Ring Bench by Chris Kabel

Wood Ring Bench by Chris Kabel
The Wood Ring bench by Chris Kabel has been nominated for the Dutch Design Awards

Wood Ring Bench 2010

Oregon Pine

Ø 280, 30 / 35 cm

Edition of 12 by Galerie Kreo, Parijs

A massive wooden beam of 10 metres long has been sawed in a hundred pieces. Those pieces have been fit together accordingly, until a circlular bench is formed. This circle formation has woodgrains that go on without being interrupted. A metal circular band keeps the pieces together.

Wood Ring is part of an installation that Chris Kabel made for Tent and Witte de With – two institutions that share a building together. Every year they invite a designer to design an installation in the lobby of their only shared space in the building.

Because of its shape, construction and material the bench is a meeting place where people make contact in a natural manner. Surrounded by the wood of one enormous tree, everyone feels safe enough to open up to those around them. Wood Ring has the same effect that a sauna has, but without the heat and damp.

The function, shape and construction connect in a surprising but logical way. At the same time Wood Ring gains a special social function that brings people closer together – it makes them in a interact with in other in a free and natural manner. The bench calls out to the nostalgic memory of Monday mornings at school, where all the childred are seated in a circle and tell stories to each other about their weekend. Like some sort of ‘social interaction machine’, Wood Ring invites people to step over the wooden ridge circle (like with a bath tub) to take place on the inner side of the bench and when they do, something automatically makes them to open up and strike up conversations.

Via Dutch Design Awards

Seam Chair by Chris Kabel (again)

Seam Bag 01

Through Elit Alice I noticed Chris Kabel, a Dutch designer, born in Haarlem in 1975 and a graduate from the Eindhoven Design Academy in 2000 again. He lives and works in Rotterdam.

His Seam Chair is a composite bag tailored to the shape of a chair which is filled with sand and put in an oven under pressure. After some baking the sand is taken out leaving a hollow super strong chair made out of only polypropylene.

Seam Chair by Chris Kabel

Seam Chair by Chris Kabel

Seam Chair by Chris Kabel

VIVID Gallery presents: Show 01-07 Chris Kabel September 30 – 18 November 18, 2007 Kabel describes his designs as usable poetics. They are the result of a rather clinical dissection of objects and their context which enables him to analyze separately function from decoration and shape from material. He then puts these parts back tohether again in his own way, not unlike a modern doctor Frankenstein. Now based in Rotterdam, he has studied at the Design Academy of Eindhoven, where he was noticed by Droog Design. His graduation project the Sticky Lamp was included in their catalogue in 2002, the beginning of an ongoing collaboration including commissions and exhibitions. Mooi and Royal VKB have followed, and some of his products have entered the collections of the Boijmans van Beuningen, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the FNAC (french foundation for contemporary art).

via Galerie Vivid