Production Values
Maarten van Severen

There are points of connection between furniture and architecture, and there are fundamental differences. It is not too difficult to list these differences. Furniture is usually of human scale and sits within space. Architecture is bigger, encloses space, copes with multiple constraints; it is built to a particular brief and for a particular client, and cannot be perfected through prototyping. Furniture moves, architecture stays where it is ...

And yet there are connections. For one thing, many of the iconic pieces of twentieth century furniture have been designed by architects. Furniture has been the testing ground for the concepts of architecture, precisely because it is free from the multiplicity of functions that a building must perform. Peter Smithson wrote in 1986: "It could be said that when we design a chair, we make a society and city in miniature. Certainly this has never been more true than in this century. One has a perfectly clear notion of the sort of city and the sort of society envisaged by Mies van der Rohe, even though he has never said much about it. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Miesian city is implicit in the Miesian chair." However, the irony of much Modern furniture, and one that would not be lost on Maarten van Severen, is its essentially hand-crafted nature. Though they are conceived ideologically as mass-produced items available to a wide number of people, the products are in fact made by hand in small batches, sold at a high price and gain value because of their exclusivity rather than their availability.

For fifteen years van Severen has been engaged in the production of furniture that looks for all the world machine made. It is clean-lined, undecorated, rigorously engineered; and yet it is essentially a craft product, made by skilled craftsmen in very small batches, hand finished, labour intensive... expensive. In 1992, van Severen's "Chair No. 2" was chosen by Vitra to "become" an industrial product, and the torturous process of transformation began. Compromises, alterations, simplifications and complications ensued over a three-year period. It gained a flexible polyurethane integral foam seat and lost its square section aluminium legs in its journey to becoming the "0.3" chair, but formally remained essentially the same. However the Vitra chair can be extruded, pressed and moulded into existence in ten minutes, where it had taken van Severen's workshop several hours. So now a "Maarten van Severen" chair is available to a much larger number of people at a much lower cost. Van Severen the person seemed ambiguous about the merits or otherwise of the Vitra-fication of Chair No.2: perhaps a passing regret at the redundancy of manual skill, and a stunned awe at the capability of machines.

Such a continual process of refinement is not possible in a building. A building is a 1:1 one-off, put together on site, necessarily. Van Severen referred to the building process as neanderthal and frustrating. However, his fittings for the recent Koolhaas house in Bordeaux more than match the architectural bravura. An 8 metre high wall of translucent bookshelves, made of glass plate reinforced resin, is strong enough to be slotted and glued together without the need for additional fixings. The Plexiglass bathroom counter, 5 metres long and 80mm thick, transforms the basin into a pool of water in a hollow, and reveals the pipework in milled channels. But one has the impression that if the interior fittings had gone throught the slow and obsessive process of prototyping and refinement, they might have ended up more subtle: less of a tour-de-force perhaps, but with a more inherent sense of rigour and balance.

Despite his hesitancy and seeming slight discomfort (perhaps it was the chair, not one of his own), van Severen did not impress by diversity, but by consistency. He makes a wide range of tables, but these are striking for their similarity and sparseness. A rectangular slab or board with a leg at each corner, that's it. No overhangs or projections, no rails or struts, nothing. Tables of almost the same dimensions are made in materials as different as steel and timber and aluminium. Despite the apparently Modern appearance of the tables, they do not comply with the idea that different materials demand different forms because of their different characteristics. The tables are isomorphic. The form is established by an idea of what a table is, and to make it work in the different materials requires considerable ingenuity (post-tensioning devices and such like) and an intimate knowledge of the material.

In contrast to the austerity and limited range of forms, van Severen uses an almost flamboyant range of materials: aluminium, bakelite, carbon fibre, concrete, stone, glass, laminated bamboo, leather, plexiglass, plywood, polycarbonate, polyester, polyurethane, reinforced glass fibre, stone and timber. There is a respect for the particularities of materials, not only their structural qualities, but as surfaces, with visual and tactile qualities. The surfaces are are not 'closed off' but are left to show themselves in an, as it were, more natural state. Aluminium is sanded and waxed, rather than anodised. Timber is rubbed with soap, not varnished. These finishes allow time to take its toll and leave its marks. The materials are not mute and invariable, but wear their history well. This responsiveness to use and performance is evident too in the way that the materials are engineered. The 0.3 chair is (apparently) remarkably flexible and therefore comfortable, because of two strips of flexible steel within the polyurethane integral foam, which allow the chair to bend and return to its original shape with the movements of the sitter. The 'Blue Bench', a large low sofa, is simply made of two rectangular, detached, blocks of polyurethane, painted with polyurethanic paint, so that the upper block can be placed at will and will not slip.

Maarten van Severen delivered the World Architecture Day Lecture in October, sponsored by the Ministry of the Flemish Community.

Laura Mays is a furniture maker and architect based in County Wicklow.