Oh No? Oh Yes! – the Oyes Charity Chair based on the Ono Chair





Oyes Charity Chair based on the Ono Chair by Dutch architects Hofman Dujardin. With this non chair they again give an example of the typical Dutch way of thinking outside the box. Although….why not take the table in stead of the chair in the neighborhood of the Table Mountain?

Urban Charity for Cape Town
The German magazine AIT invited 100 selected architecture and interior design offices across Europe to redesign the ‘ONO’ chair produced the Dietiker company. The newly designed chairs will be exhibited in the context of a road show in the AIT-Architektur Salons Hamburg, Munich, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Stuttgart. The auction of the chairs will talk place in autumn 2010. The revenues generated through this auction will support the Langa Township in Cape Town, South Africa.

After we received the beautiful ONO chair designed by Matthias Weber we asked ourselves why would we transform a beautiful chair? Why would we start cutting, pasting, painting, sewing while the product is good the way it is? We decided to change the approach, in stead of transforming the chair we decided to transform the context. The chair stays the way it is, we only create a new surrounding stimulating the fantasy of the observer. After studying various options the final choice was to upscale the chair a 1000 times and place it in Cape Town, the final destination of the Charity project.

The chair becomes a model of a building with a height of 760m, an urban icon for Cape Town. The transformation lies within our own fantasy. The mental change due to the overwhelming scale, entirely compensates the absence of physical changement of the chair itself . While the ONO chair can be used by a maximum of two people, the OYES chair with a surface of 800.000m² can host about 50.000 people. An extremely generous chair!! Four slim feet of 25x30m will touch Cape Town in the business district and the harbor. These four new locations will be connected through identical towers with a height of 460m. Each foot will intervene in the existing urban fabric, connecting people from different areas.