In the early 1980s many young designers began to question industrial production methods and elected to return to the artisanal production of one-offs and small series instead. The members of the B.R.A.N.D. group in Austria are a good example of this.1 Their 2.85 bench made of artfully wound steel wire is suggestive of the period’s new-found love of craftsmanship: defiantly ‘anti’, it is like Viennese Actionism, Punk, and 1980s zeitgeist all rolled into one. B.R.A.N.D. saw furniture manufacture first and foremost as action – a spontaneous action unshackled by convention. They entered the workshop, set themselves a time limit of twenty-four hours – hence the term ‘24-hour furniture’ – and got down to work. For the sofa shown here they used steel wire, whose properties make it an ideal material for working directly and spontaneously. The only tools needed were a mechanical bending machine and a welding torch to bind the joints. The results anticipate the Corallo sofa created by the Campana brothers some twenty years later.
Text: Volker Albus
