A chair made from many decisions
The Pixel chair offers a clear way into Joris Laarman's workshop. Cooper Hewitt describes a resin prototype made from many individually cut pieces. A CNC-directed router cuts the parts; they are joined and then finished by hand. Digital instructions, assembly and surface work all belong to the same object.2
The resulting grey pattern helps the eye read that sequence. Its small areas suggest the enlarged pixels of a digital image, while their arrangement makes a continuous chair surface. A process associated with images becomes visible in a place to sit.
The hand finishing is an especially useful detail. It keeps the story close to the material object after the cutting file has done its work.
A workshop with different kinds of skill
In its 2017 exhibition account, Cooper Hewitt describes Joris Laarman Lab as a team of engineers, programmers and craftspeople. Laarman founded it with filmmaker Anita Star in 2004. The museum's description gives collaboration a practical meaning: different skills participate in developing the process as well as the result.3
A programmer can help define relationships within a form; a making process determines how those relationships can be realised in material. Assembly and finishing then bring another set of decisions into play.
That arrangement makes the workshop itself interesting. Its tools include code and machines, alongside the judgement needed to turn parts into an object someone can see and touch.
The object keeps the question visible
MoMA's artist record identifies Laarman as Dutch and lists the Bone Chair and a Microstructures Gradient prototype among his works. The collection offers different physical expressions of his interest in generating structure through design methods.1
The Pixel example adds another expression: a chair whose small pieces make the route from digital pattern to assembled material unusually legible. It gives a viewer something concrete to follow through a broader technical practice.
A useful starting question is therefore simple: what had to happen after the shape appeared on a screen? In Laarman's work, that question opens the door to the people, tools and material decisions inside the workshop.
