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After centuries of worshipping virgins, bathing nymphs and rolling hills, the art world reached a tipping point. Painters such as Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky became masters of two-dimensional planes crisscrossed with crisscrossing lines. Flattened, ordered and unnatural, the simple grid “declared the modernity of modern art,” wrote art historian Rosalind Krauss. Now, furniture designers are adding another dimension with their own grid-like designs.
For their latest release, Brooklyn duo Jean and Oliver Pelle created a three-sided chair in hardwood and a sumptuous mohair blend. Instead of solid panels, the sides of the chair are made of woven fabric. Quadrat armchair ($4,900) are reduced to grids of thin sheets. “In three dimensions, when things overlap and different directions start to emerge, it’s really interesting to see how complex the grid becomes,” Oliver says. “Your mind is trying to break it down and understand what you’re seeing.”
The couple met in architecture school and, because of their formal training, Jean says, they can’t help but see the world through a grid: “It’s always there.” Carrizo picture cabinet (POA), becomes a window into her original pastel drawing of Carrizo Plain, California, where the couple spent their first road trip. “It’s like a visual complement to the artwork,” she says.
London-based lighting designer Cristina Prandoni also exploits the transparency of the grid. Wall lamp with grid (from £2,950) features perforated steel slats that extend beyond the sides of its opal glass body. “I thought it would be much more beautiful viewed from the side and would distribute the light in a more interesting way,” he says of the overlapping louvers. Available in raw steel or with a red powder-coated finish, the lamp is inspired by the geometric creations of 20th-century design house Wiener Werkstätte.
To design outdoor furniture that didn’t flaunt an open patio, Belgian studio Muller Van Severen turned to a stainless steel mesh, producing structural yet transparent seating. The curved mesh of the Wire loungers S (from €2,900) also creates interesting warped shadows that blend nicely with the yellow bricks of Villa Cavrois, the modernist mansion in Lille, where they were exhibited in 2020. Cable C #1 cabinet (from €4,400), an extension of the collection, was recently installed in Paradis Apartment, a new designer holiday apartment in Ostend. The Danish brand Cauldron It also uses powder-coated steel lattices, creating shelves and tables in a fun pastel colour palette (from £46.90).
The wire furniture trend owes much to 20th-century designer Shiro Kuramata, whose How tall is the moon chair? Kuramata emulated a comfortable club chair using fine diamond-patterned mesh. “The biggest problem is gravity,” Kuramata once said, attempting to defy it with his diaphanous creations. Many of them are now on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Azzedine Alaïa Foundationalong with the Tunisian designer’s dresses in lurex lace and viscose mesh.
“The funny thing is,” says the designer, It will be Choui Of his new Per.for.(h)ated steel mesh collection, he says, “These pieces look super light and airy, but they’re going to weigh hundreds of pounds.” He notes that the grids can add structure and strength as well as visual appeal. So far, the range consists of a coffee table ($4,500), as well as an armchair and a loveseat ($7,500 and $13,500), whose velvet upholstery floats within the semitransparent structure, while an inverted pyramid base disappears beneath them.
For Choui, grids symbolise learning: each grid is a new layer of knowledge, and the remaining empty spaces are the things he has yet to discover. “But I also think they have a sickly look to them,” he adds. His 1979 collection was inspired by the brutalist architecture of Sydney’s Masonic Centre, rendered in an acid orange. At first, the colour was an homage to his hometown of Montreal (“this bright orange saturates the city, especially because of the huge traffic cones”), but then it became a way for Choui to come out of his shell. On his 1979 table ($2,500) he added a smoked glass top, which subtly reveals the aluminium structure beneath.
Grids have long been an essential tool for designers, forming the basis of great architecture and graphics. Massimo Vignelli, creator of the 1972 New York subway map, compared them to underwear: always present, but never exposed. Evidently, the furniture world disagrees. Here, the grids are not just exposed, they are imposed, superimposed, and sometimes neon orange.