First conceived in 2020, Max Lamb’s 'Economy' chair started as an experiment in waste reduction – a theme that has recurred throughout the London-based designer’s practice. Its original form was hand-cut from polystyrene foam using hot wire and is the result of a series of prototypes that led to a structure that left as little waste as possible on the workshop floor. ‘It's taking what some people perceive to be artisanal into something more industrialised, much more practical, pragmatic and efficient.’
Case in point, the chair now makes its large-scale production debut, as part of Swedish design brand Hem’s furniture collection. The new edition, dubbed ‘Min’ is made of pine, a material that perfectly matches Lamb’s intuitive process. To produce it, individual timber elements are cut at diagonal angles and split to become the legs, back and seat, an exercise in material efficiency that speaks to Lamb’s ability to combine a distinctive design language with a particular attention to the possibilities of an object’s construction.
Max Lamb's Min chair for Hem: an exercise in reduction
Creating the chair involves a rigorous process of reduction: 'the design itself has been conceived to use almost half the quantity of material that would be required to make the same chair with square legs,' explains Lamb. 'By cutting the legs in half diagonally to create triangular legs, you end up with two legs for the price of one – or two legs from the amount of material it would normally take to make one.
'What gives the chair its personality and character is not necessarily about using as little material as possible. Rather, it’s about making one piece of material go twice as far as it otherwise would if the legs were square.'
Lamb's practice has historically been focused on hands-on making: his work has ranged from metal furniture bent by hand, to cutting up a tree to make a seating series, to taping up cardboard into chairs. 'The Min Chair has been developed and refined over a lot of iterations: all of the development and prototyping happens within my workshop,' he explains. 'Because I’m first and foremost a maker and run a workshop-based practice, I am able to refine the design in real time. I want to make sure that the design is responsive to material, the properties of the material, and the production process.
'The design is a consequence of the making process and my endeavour to achieve these efficiencies in production and material usage. The outcome is a chair that has personality, has an aesthetic, but that aesthetic and that personality are consequences of those endeavours to efficiency.'
