Drought Chair by the we+ design studio

Japanese design studio we+ have developed a chair called Drought. The manufacturing of the bronze chair uses a natural dehydration process. The idea behind the chair is to transform a temporary state into an immutable piece of furniture. The unmistakable texture and shape are created in a mould consisting of a mixture of wax and ultra-absorbent resin. In the dehydration process, saturated resin balls shrink from around 10 mm to 1 mm in diameter. After they have shrunk, they are removed from the wax.

At first, the airy-looking structure misleads us concerning its true composition. Indeed, diligent architecture theorists could interpret the sponge-like appearance of the metal in the sense of Gottfried Semper’s Stoffwechseltheorie: over the course of the history of architecture, a transition takes place from one material to another as a function of architectural shift. Thereby, the characteristics of the first material become decorative elements of the other. However, it is altogether possible that the designers were simply taken with the idea of controlling time.