We find something incredibly compelling about Marjin Van der Poll‘s Do hit chair: hammering a chair out of a metal cube with all one’s strength, testing it out, and then pounding and hammering and testing over and over until it takes shape. The cube is smashed full force with a hammer, until it becomes… something else, a solution.
“Do hit… is an interpretation of a chair by Italian designer Enzo Mari, the ‘sof-sof chair’. Its complex looking frame to me seemed a result of good craftsmanship but as it turned out it was one of the first examples of spot welding in the furniture industry. This contradiction between craftsmanship and mass production became the concept for the chair. Do hit started as a small copper model which I beat into a tiny chair with the pointed part of a hobby hammer. The cube would be easy to produce industrially and would be moulded into a chair using a hammer. Repetition of the beating only strengthened the concept…
The Do hit can either be shaped by its owner or by me. I have shaped many Do hits and look for an expressive object with large folds which I then polish to make them stand out. Each Do hit therefore is different as I can only create the global shape of seat and backrest and have to react to the detailed form taken on by the metal as it is being shaped. This is a great challenge every time.”
Of course, we followed the trail back to Enzo’s Mari inspiring chair, designed in 1971, (now in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection)…
Then we tried to follow the trail in our mind from Mari’s chair to the violently smashed cube above, to try to imagine Van der Poll’s imagining…
We are happy to look closely at its unique clever design out of spot-welded rectangles, and see what it inspires…
Mari’s is being fabricated again and can be bought here, though you can often buy the real thing here.
