A strip takes a useful route
Gijs Bakker’s Strip chair makes the path of a wooden strip worth following. The studio describes six laminated-beech strips, joined with dowels and finished with ash veneer. Centraal Museum records its Stripstoel SC, made by Castelijn, as a 1974 design.21
The chair turns the idea of a line into something with width, thickness and a job to do. Looking along the bent material connects the surface a person meets with the supports beneath it. The route is part of the explanation, rather than a decorative flourish added to an otherwise conventional frame.
Bending changes the furniture vocabulary
Laminating and bending allow comparatively thin timber to follow curves that a straight board cannot simply adopt. The museum’s material record distinguishes beech and ash; the studio explains the layered strips and their joining. Together the accounts make the construction more intelligible without supplying a workshop bending pattern.
Follow one strip, then look at the space beside it. Repetition gives the object a rhythm, while the intervals keep the overall form open. The eye can move between individual paths and the whole chair. It is a physical idea that is easiest to appreciate when the wood remains visually legible as strips.
Enough structure to read the idea
The SC example has its own material record and dimensions. Those details should not be borrowed indiscriminately for another chair from Bakker’s bent-wood work or an armrest variant. Keeping the particular design in view makes its ingenuity clearer.
Strip asks a familiar material to change direction and a familiar object to reveal that change. A chair can look like an arrangement of lines while remaining a carefully assembled piece of furniture. The delight lies in being able to follow the route and gradually discover why it becomes a place to sit.