23 September 2015

It was back in the 1920s that chairs with a metal structure came to be seen as the symbol of a functionalist approach to design, i.e. of a clean aesthetic free from unnecessary frills. The Officina collection of seats and tables, designed by the Bouroullec brothers for Magis, would appear to fit into this tradition but, as often happens with the French golden boys of design, reality does not always match expectations. The series is undoubtedly characterized by its metal framework, but it is a very different one from the chrome-plated extruded tubes that give machine-made furniture its perfect shiny and stainless image. Here the rods are made of wrought iron, a material that can boast an age-old practice of brutal working, as it is beaten and bent into shape with blows of a hammer. Iron worked in this manner calls to mind Vulcan’s forge, the physical strength of the divine blacksmith and a morphological tradition in which the material was modeled by imperfect artisan skills. And to move even further away from the industrial precision of the metal tube, Officina is also reminiscent of the process of refinement taken to an extreme in the early work of Giacometti, that great master of the struggle between solid and void, between material and its absence. And that is how the happy contrast is born: in the hands of the Bouroullec brothers, the rods are turned into a laconic, elegant framework, a support for objects that vibrate with a force rendered sublime in gesture and in function. The irregular surface of the rods is a mark of the manual phase of their production, a sign of the work of man united with that of the machine, which makes the necessary trappings—shelves and tops—out of smooth materials (plastic, leather, wood, glass, slate, Carrara marble and electrogalvanized sheet metal).