Paradoxically, Japanese rock gardens (sekitei) provide the feeling of water by removing all water from the landscape. Pebbles layered together become the surface of a lake or an ocean, and combed patterns become waves and ripples. Larger stones become mountains and islands. They are the ultimate abstract expression, conveying a sense of widely varying material, scale and movement (through waves and waterfalls) through the arrangement of things.
Based on this philosophy, we bent ordinary steel pipes to create multiple ‘flows’ like the overlapping layered lapels of a kimono. Like the rock gardens, our idea was to design a chair that expresses movement within a limited space.