Views of Nature in Spatial Elements

When giving form to an image, the process often involves the image appearing and disappearing, much like an esquisse—a preliminary sketch that exists as an image but not as a tangible object. The afterimages of such creations emerge and vanish in various ways. This led us to wonder: could we capture this ephemeral world of esquisses, or even a sequence of them, as a case study? For this exploration, we focused on one of the most familiar pieces of furniture—the stool. Using this as our theme, we created a series of 16 designs, each representing a different stage in the esquisse process. Rather than thinking of furniture as a stand-alone piece, we examined the situations created when multiple stools are arranged in a space, transforming them into a collective composition. In the case of stools, lining up identical forms can be simply beautiful, but can also feel slightly unnatural. In nature, no two things are exactly alike, so subtle differences may feel more organic and harmonious. With this in mind, the series was developed using a structure composed of parts of quadratically curved surfaces. Molded plywood was chosen as the material for its key property: suitability for mass production. However, instead of emphasizing uniformity, we explored “small quantities of many different products” through derivative variations, challenging the conventional idea of identical mass-produced objects. These uneven series of stools aim to reflect a view of nature, offering diversity within a framework of everyday spatial elements.