Furniture as an Art Practice Product Design Exploration

Over the last four years, WØRKS co-founder Haris Fazlani has been designing furniture. Not necessarily with overtly commercial intentions, but more as a meditative art practice that expands beyond our traditional working disciplines. ​“For me, feels like a natural extension of my fascination with sculpture, a way to create functional art that coun­ter­bal­ances the intan­gi­bil­i­ty of screen-based work,” he says.

​“There’s a profound comfort in making something tactile, analog, rooted in the physical world.” From the visual pre­car­i­ous­ness of the Italic Chair to the appre­ci­a­tion of shadows of the Level Workstation, each piece seeks to do convey the purity of a single artistic idea while remaining entirely functional. 

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The concept for The Shelf Daybed began as an off-the-cuff musing by Vincent Van Duysen about the ability for books to be the ​“pro­tag­o­nists” of a space. The inten­tion­al­i­ty of living in a simple, serene space, with everything hidden but books — art objects in their own right — gave birth to the Shelf Daybed, a modular daybed with space to exalt a selection of books. 

The Level Table, designed specif­i­cal­ly for the WØRKS office is named aptly not only because of its resemblance to a level tool, but because of its use as a tool for work itself. The voids create oppor­tu­ni­ties for and acknowledge the ​“thingness” of light. These light and shadow inter­ac­tions invite us to place the table not directly against a wall, but rather with some space around it. In a way, the object has an opinion on its own placement in a space.

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The affec­tion­ate­ly named Italic Chair, inspired by the illusory danger of Brancusi sculptures, is a chair tilted at 12 degrees. It focuses quietly on this simple idea, showing no other visible features, and no joinery, and operates seamlessly as a stable, usable lounge chair.

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Credits

  • 3D Renders
    Bryan Meador
  • Photography
    David Zshu