Two Architect-Designers Explore the Infinite Possibilities of a Single Loop
The latest pieces by designer duo Aranda\Lasch don’t look like furniture. They look more like blown-up versions of the small bendable sculptures you might find on the desks of physics professors and psychologists.
Indeed, unexpected functionality is a hallmark of the artists’ work. Benjamin Aranda and Christopher Lasch, the minds behind the design firm Aranda\Lasch, share backgrounds in architecture as well as a variety of wide-ranging interests. Together, their oeuvre features not only furniture and installations—including pieces in the MoMA’s permanent collection—but also video works and even a set for indie band Yeasayer. Across each of these mediums, their goals are the same: to find infinite variation and, as Lasch has said, to put in place “a process from which you can guarantee surprises.”
In their “Railing” series, featured at Miami Design 2015 with Gallery ALL, each piece of furniture is made from a single loop of modular stainless steel pipe. The loop twists, curves and bends, curling around itself while creating a sense of movement. Each piece looks almost like a living thing—something that morphs and grows.
The “Railing” pieces—two chairs and a stool—are upholstered in leather or silicone foam, with the look and feel of handlebar grips. They have also been fashioned in a variety of colors: monochromatic white, black, and hunter green, or two-toned with dazzling shades of metal. Crucially, each piece in the modular series is built from the same set of pipes. Tangled though they may seem, the twisted shapes run a geometrically precise route through a lattice of fractal circles. But please sit. This is furniture, after all.
