Milan 2018, solid wood, hand stained, height 76 cm, width 56 cm, depth 57 cm, height of seat 46 cm. (DRAX)

A unique piece in wood. The later production is moulded from polyurethane and has a reinforcing metal core. The present piece is the original prototype of the limited edition which followed.

Presented as a prototype for the first time at the Salone del Mobile in Milan in 2018. The model is part of the permanent collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

“GU CHAIR” is part of the design research that is conducted with the utmost conviction by MAD, notably including the work that has involved the Chinese architecture office in the George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles and other important architectural projects worldwide. This research tends to confuse architecture with landscape, making the built work an extension and sometimes a metaphor of the natural context in which it stands, yet without ever compromising on its contemporary spirit. On the scale of the everyday object, this relationship with nature becomes organic: GU (which means “bone” in Chinese) becomes an opportunity for experimenting how to translate every living being’s fibrous connective tissue into the difficult typology of the chair. From this standpoint, this solid wooden chair takes on the appearance of a unique structure, a figure whose components link seamlessly, so that one element is part of the next, in a unique complementary synthesis of matter and form.