The mark is a wireframe suggesting a chair with most of the material stripped away. That's the question underneath the whole project: what actually constitutes a chair? How do you know when you've made one? What's a chair actually for? How little can you use and still have one? Is a stool a chair? Is a bench a chair? Is stool-ness a subset of chair-ness? Craftspeople have been trying to realize that idealized, perfect chair out of bent wood, plastic, metal tubing, textiles, and stones for centuries. Chris and Kristian continue the legacy with whatever is lying around Chris's shop — or that they found on the roadside or in a closet — each week, for our collective sitting enjoyment.
The rules
Chris Attenborough and Kristian Bjørnard make a chair a week — found materials, whatever’s leftover in the shop. Three guidelines, no exceptions: it has to be functional, it has to be safe, and it has to be finished in one work session.
Where to find them
The chairs live at Union Brewing Taproom in Baltimore. Come see them in person. If you can’t, buy this patch — a semiotic signal for chair-ness you can wear wherever you are, that idealized form that appears in your head the instant someone says the word "chair."
The projection
Alongside the chairs runs a loop of the reference material behind them — chair history, quotes, museum pieces, and whatever else the research turned up — drawn from the chair-ness channel on Are.na. It plays as context in the room. Watch it here.
In the shop
This project is still going — a log of individual builds will grow here week by week. First entry: the mark itself.
-
Chair-ness mark — the idealized diamond form the project keeps returning to Ongoing
Week-by-week builds go here as they’re finished. This first entry is the project’s mark rather than a chair — check back, or subscribe to the newsletter for updates as new ones get added.