Aviary chair

source: fredriksonstallard

Fredrikson Stallard’s obsessive studies and investigations of the analogue and the digital, the hand formed vs. the machine made are also very much present in the Crush exhibition. The elegant Aviary chair is derived from the hand-formed modelling of miniature aluminium sheets, what they call the analogue stage. These are then transformed, modelled and manipulated digitally using 3D scanning and modelling techniques before being taken back to the original analogue stage by hand crafting the final shape. The Aviary chair, with over 2500 weld joints, all created by hand, emphasise its network of curves to create a semi-transparent confection of black-painted steel rods. ‘It is important to us that we are always true to the nature of materials and that the forms seem effortless in their construction, even though they are rigidly controlled by our hand and eye,’ they say of the rippling shape.
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source: fredriksonstallard

Fredrikson Stallard is a furniture design studio founded by Patrik Fredrikson and Ian Stallard.

As we penetrate ever deeper into the digital age, we are leaving behind modernism’s driving imperative. The new age is a more fluid, more transient one, and it is in need of typologies that reflect these new parameters. Form and Function have long ceased to be valid guidelines for designers working in a world overflowing with objects that do everything for us and yet are completely devoid of meaning; it is against this backdrop that Fredrikson Stallard’s work should be viewed.

Theirs is a vocabulary that speaks to us simultaneously from many levels and seamlessly blends archaic traditions with the avant-garde. Their pieces are fairy tales for grown ups: they combine simple surface narratives of great graphical clarity with underlying themes of opulent and sensual darkness.

These are sophisticated tools for ambivalent times, almost mythical in their character; they evoke feelings of fragility and surprise, decay and desire, and in doing so they challenge cultural preconceptions and notions of how we live and about the plethora of objects we surround ourselves with. Fredrikson Stallard’s exceptional sensibility is so finely tuned that it allows itself to respond with primal urgency to the impulses they perceive and amplify them into objects, from industrial production to unique bespoke pieces. The results are so self evident that they speak to us on a subliminal level.

Fredrikson Stallard’s products, furniture and interiors balance on the ridge between the traditions of the past and the dreams of the future, with a healthy disregard for the conventions of both. The juxtaposition and fusion of elements from both sides give us glimpses of another, barely tangible reality: a reality where all things are deeper, darker and altogether more fantastic.