This piece of furniture by Japanese designer Yuya Ushida can be transformed into a sofa or chair, as required, depending on the space available. As part of his graduation project at the Design Academy Eindhoven, Ushida studied the proportions customarily applied to various types of seating furniture and then explored possible mechanisms by which these might be varied. The outcome was SOFA_XXXX, an intricate mesh of bamboo sticks and metal rings. Working in collaboration with the Dutch furniture maker Ahrend, Ushida took this design a stage further by turning it into an industrially made kit of injection-moulded parts. These plastic parts are simply snapped together to form either the concertina-type sofa shown here or the XXXX_Stool. The sofa comprises more than 13,000 parts in eight different shapes and may be provided either assembled or as a kit for home assembly. Paola Antonelli, senior architecture and design curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, nominated this intricate piece for the 2012 Design of the Year Award of the London Design Museum, citing its ‘abstract transparent beauty’.
Text: Adrian Luncke
