Showcased at the Vienna Design Week 2011, the M3 Chair designed by Thomas Feichtner is based on a geometric theme with a wooden cantilever construction. Produced by Neue Wiener Werkstätte, the installation highlights not only the tension between closed and open, heavy and light, surface and line, and mass-production and the single copy, but also the symbiosis between traditional workmanship and contemporary design. These pieces thus embody Neue Wiener Werkstätte’s ideal of hand-producing technically perfect individual products built to last generations, furniture designed to guarantee historical recognizability—the perfect union of hand-craftsmanship, tradition and design.
The M3 chair design experiments with functionality, structural engineering and material. Created using oak wood, both its back and its armrests are mere tangents of the construction, the functions of which are only discovered via actual use. With a seating surface floating within the construction and legs extending far to the sides, the M3 is most assuredly not a chair that saves space—it is much rather one which creates a space.
“The M3 Chair an artistic and experimental examination of design removed from industry and mass-production, as art and design placed in interdisciplinary dialogue with one another. The M3 Chair intends to show that design can free itself from the doctrine of the purely objective and is not automatically obligated to serve industrial utility.”
