Strips that describe a chair
Tejo Remy and René Veenhuizen give Bamboo Chair a small, repeated vocabulary of parts. Centraal Museum describes its example through seven bent and glued bamboo strips. Their arrangement brings the seat and supporting areas into the same visual system.1
The National Gallery of Victoria dates the design to 2007 and the manufacture of its particular example to 2023. Its description explains the exploration of laminated bamboo through bending and assembling strips.2
Start with one strip and follow its curve. The change of direction helps connect areas that a conventional chair might describe through separate rails, legs and a covered seat.
The memory of a basket
The NGV compares the result to a woven basket. It is a useful visual comparison: repeated strips and the spaces between them describe a larger volume.2
A basket is familiar through the relationship between an enclosing form and the open pattern that makes it. That association gives the chair's unfamiliar curves an approachable point of reference.
The comparison concerns appearance; the documented making account is bent and assembled laminated strips. Their breadth and repetition let the eye keep track of the material while reading the whole chair.
Looking along the bends
Bending gives a strip more than one direction within the object. Looking along a curve draws attention from a relatively flat area towards a rising or supporting one.
The open spaces matter too. They separate the parts enough for each curve to remain legible, while the repeated material brings the parts back together.
Bamboo Chair asks the eye to assemble its whole from those relationships. A small kit of strips becomes memorable because its repetition never quite settles into a simple straight line.