DAMn° has invited an eclectic mix of about 25 designers to participate in

the exhibition Prophets & Penitents –Confessions of a chair at the Oratorio

della Passione at Sant’Ambrogio -Milan’s archetypal church - to express

their personal confessions on chair prototyping, with many of the pieces

seen in public for the first time.

 

Fernando & Humberto Campana (BR),

Jurgen Bey (NL), Konstantin Grcic

(DE), Patricia Urquiola (ES/IT), Jerszy

Seymour (DE/UK), Martí Guixé (ES),

Ilkka Suppanen (FI), Ineke Hans (NL),

BarberOsgerby (UK), Sylvain Willenz

(BE), Richard Hutten (NL), Ronan &

Erwan Bouroullec (FR), Peter Marigold

(UK), Maarten Baas (NL), 5.5 Designers

(FR), Fabio Novembre (IT) and Kwangho

Lee (KR), ao*

 

A chair is a chair is a chair. Some come close to religion, others are ugly as sin. A narrative on an almost sacral theme, for the designer the creation of a chair is like that of a string quartet to the composer: a unique reading of it creator’s cerebral signature, revealing his modus operandi against the zeitgeist.
 

To celebrate the existence of this daily-life four-legged comfort-bringer,

about twenty-five designers were invited to the Oratorio della Passione at

Sant’Ambrogio - Milan’s oldest church - to express their personal confessions on chair prototyping.

 

The exhibition reveals the invisible detours on the quest for perfection. Those imperfect-perfect moments, where against all the clichés of digital 3D moulding, prototyping still continues to be regularly performed, in this instance, by the canonical elite and the choirboys as well.

 

That the word ‘prototype’ is an elastic concept, we experienced upon receiving the first entries. Some chairs are a prototype to the true sense of the word: first experiments in a preliminary stadium of the design process to mass-production.
 

Others are rather one-off sculptures - intended or not – (nearly) finished pieces doomed to stay a first prototype forever – with or against their will. But there’s a place for everyone in the church: having different genders, we decided to give them a different wing in the chapel.