When designing the new chair of Balaton Bútorgyár, Dániel Lakos was looking to answer the question of how products can be manufactured with the help of modern industrial techniques that recall the uniqueness and unrepeatable nature of objects fabricated with ancient artisanal techniques.
“I have been intrigued by the thought of repeating the almost identical elements constituting nature in an industrial product for more than ten years. Duckweed on the lake, bubbles in mineral water, the leaves of the tree, blades of grass in the field – they are beautiful exactly because there are many of them and none of them is fully identical.” – tells product designer Dániel Lakos about the starting idea of the TILT chair. “The industrial revolution ended the unrepeatable nature of objects. Today, uniqueness must be paid for, the deviations – defects – resulting from being hand-crafted increase the value of the product. You won’t find two identical Persian rugs, pottery items, old glass bottles or roof tiles – the beauty of these objects lies in the fact that imperfection is part of naturalness.”
Even though the chair of Balaton Bútorgyár titled TILT is a piece of furniture usable for large crowds, in dining rooms and banquet halls, is stackable and light-weight, it isn’t impersonal and does not have an industrial feeling to it. “I distorted the rectangular contour of the back of my chair in a manner that it’s lightly bent, inclined. I mirrored this distorted shape, this is how the three types of chairs came into being. As the distortion is only to a small extent, it is not too obvious, and neither can its extent be determined right away. In a large crowd, it cannot be determined how many types of chairs I apply exactly, it rather seems as if every item were different from the other, yet the desired organic effect can be felt vividly. The profiles of the chairs are identical in all three variations, only the silhouette of the backs differ from each other, and so the factors of comfort are not influenced by asymmetry.” – describes the designer the chair.
TILT will also be expanded into a product family in the near future, including a version with armrests and a table.
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