An Important 'Bone Chair'

From the early days of his career, Joris Laarman’s use of contemporary digital tools played a fundamental role in developing his personal creativity and in defining his identity as designer. Breaking from traditional furniture design, Laarman’s adopted experimental approach stimulates a formal discussion on the numerous opportunities contemporary technology offers in developing object design. A pivotal moment in Joris Laarman’s formative career took place in 1998 when the designer first discovered the work of Professor Claus Mattheck and his conclusions on the application of digital design for industrial fabrication. Laarman immediately recognised the valuable potential of applying the professor’s scientific rationale to furniture design but the opportunity only materialised when, observing nature’s intuitive ability to alter and adapt, Opel GmbH was able to formulate a logarithm which generated structures to simulate the efficiency of natural, organic forms and shapes: ‘While trees have the ability to add material where strength is needed, bones have the ability to take away material where it is not’ (Joris Laarman, Joris Laarman Lab, exh. cat., Groninger Museum, Groninger, 2015, p. 73). The designer makes use of the same notion of efficiency in his final thesis for the Design Academy in Eindhoven, from which he graduated cum laude in 2003 presenting the forward-thinking ‘Rococo Radiator’ – a digitally-generated design aiming to exploit maximum surface area to achieve optimum thermal conduction. ‘Rococo Radiator’ swiftly became an object of international interest and an exemplar design of Laarman’s future artistic expressions.

The Bone Chair is the first furniture type the designer digitally generated to simulate bones structure and their configuration; giving the digital tool specific requirements, such as seat surface and three points for releasing weight pressure on the floor, the formula develops its structure with optimal efficiency, resulting in a highly sophisticated organic shape. As Joris Laarman stated: ”The result is something so complex that no human mind could arrive at it unaided, and in fact even a supercomputer couldn’t create a design like this in one swipe. Only through the repetition of generations of simulation can a computer produce the computational effort necessary to come up with a design so high in information... the Bone Chair represents a design so advanced that it would literally have been impossible to create even a generation ago.”

A technically-challenging yet unquestionably brilliant product, the Bone Chair is skilfully cast as one unit, then polished to achieve seamless surfaces. Four other designs evolved from the now iconic Bone Furniture series, the Bone Chaise (2006), Rocker (2007), Branch (2010) and Bridge table (2010). Since its release in 2006, four of the twelve examples produced of the iconic Bone Chair have become part of permanent collections of important museums, to include the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Centraal Museum, Utrecht and the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg. A fifth example is retained in the collection of the progressive design-education establishment, Boisbuchet, France.

The Bone Chair is a remarkable object – not simply a creation of unquestionable beauty, rather its resonance lies in its triumph in achieving what the human spirit has so long tried to conquer – to emulate Nature, with affection and respect – not superficially, but with the integrity accorded by any living entity. This, to be achieved by intuition and by calculus, by spirit and by science – those stimuli that guide Nature’s own reactions – confirms the Bone Chair as amongst the first truly visionary designs of the twenty-first century.

Christie's would like to thank Joris Laarman for his assistance with the cataloguing of the present lot.