If there was a rite of passage for product designers, it would be the act of creating a chair. Wilsonart, the Temple, Texas–based manufacturer of decorative engineered surfaces, has helped young talents cross this professional threshold with its annual Wilsonart Challenges Student Chair Design Competition. Now in its 12th year, it is the longest-running student design competition of its kind in the US.
Winner Stephen Marchio with Prelude.
The competition also proves that, despite the popularity of the subject, chairs can still prompt surprising creativity. In this case, students at Detroit’s College for Creative Studies (CCS) were directed to delight sitters using products from the Wilsonart Laminate Collection.
Prelude looks as if it’s coming together or pulling apart, playing on “malfatto” or “badly made” with slanting angles that create an optical illusion.
And student Stephen Marchio delivered. His winning entry, called Prelude, looks like the lovechild of Gerrit Rietveld and Ettore Sottsass. Planes of blue, yellow and white attached to a pink armature reveal the basic construction elements of the chair, while various lines are playfully skewed to suggest falling apart. Prelude marries the pared-down abstraction of early modernism with the semiotics of the Memphis Group.
First runner-up Zachary Boomer designed the Geode Chair to resemble its namesake — a geode cracked open.
“The winning chair swept us off our feet,” says design historian Grace Jeffers, who also directs the Wilsonart Challenges. “The slanting angles of this chair are an optical illusion, which distract us from the fact that the lines of this form are perfect right angles. It’s a visual puzzle that the judges couldn’t stop thinking about.”
Pie chair by runner-up Alejandra Bucco illustrates delight through marquetry and whimsy.
Five runner-up designs accompanied Marchio’s achievement, and these entries underscore the larger design community’s renewed interest in postmodernism, with evocations of Claes Oldenburg and Alessandro Mendini supplementing the deconstructivist lines of Prelude. In addition to Jeffers, judges included lifestyle expert and entrepreneur Danny Seo, Architizer products editor Sheila Kim, MAD Museum curator Ron Labaco and CCS Dean of Undergraduate Studies Vince Carducci and Chair of Fine Arts Department Tim van Laar.
Kiho Jeong’s Root Bench looks different from every angle and can be perched on in numerous ways.
Wilsonart Challenges travels from school to school through a sponsored class. The namesake manufacturer chose to bring the competition to the College of Creative Studies, in recognition of its strong curriculum and culture of harnessing creativity for social good. The College of Architecture at the University of Houston and the product design program at the University of Oregon are among previous hosts of the competition, about which Wilsonart marketing communications director Alison DeMartino has commented, “What amazes us is how each school’s distinctive culture and approach to design unfolds throughout the project.” Past winners notably include Rich Brilliant Willing cofounder Charles Brill, who took the 2006 prize while studying at Rhode Island School of Design.
S1 by Scott Pancioli has an elegant and warm Scandinavian feel.
Another Wilsonart Challenges tradition is to show off the winning and runner-up entries at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair. This year ICFF starts May 14 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City, with the Wilsonart chairs occupying booth #2248.
Adam Whittaker’s En Throne is an imposing yet playful throne of intense color.
