À Força

stool

steel + natural wood (recycled)
2023

Inspired by traditional Japanese carpentry, wood has been carefully sculpted to the shape of steel in order to fabricate a mysterious new connection. Compressing, struggling, forcing associations between wood and metal, À força is an exploration into physical boundaries.

The project began with playful experiments. I wanted to understand the physical constraints of a connection made by pure static friction.

In search for something effective, but also instinctive and brutal, I was interested in how bamboos splintered and could be connected to slightly wider objects. It was almost silly, but the feeling of discomfort it brought fascinated me; as if the materials were fighting each other to stay together.

maple wood+nails

natural wood+steel

Looking for fighting connections based on wood and metal, I carried out experiments using different techniques. The result is a collection of spontaneous (often useless) sculptural objects.

plywood+steel

plywood+screws

Forcing pieces of natural wood against raw steel pipes was a direct translation of the bamboo connections. In addition, the counterpoint between the natural and the man-made also brought a sense of manufactured parasitism. This way, by combining different realms of brutality through natural-like structures, À força was born.

maple wood+steel

plywood+alluminium

plywood+steel

natural wood+steel

Sketches

Brochure

After 1 month of experimentation with the new technique and many drawings and idealizations, the final product was a three-legged stool made of left over wood from Phillips de Jongh Park (Eindhoven, NL), three 15 cm square steel tubes and twenty-seven 5 mm screws.

This was the first project I had the opportunity to follow from start to finish, from the first “Eureka” to the last screw. It was my introduction to crafts and it was when I fell in love with carpentry. Looking back, I'm very happy with the process I went through, even though I don't like the end result very much. From the point of view of my career as a designer, this was certainly one of the most important projects I've done to date.