MONOFORMS 05/27/08

Words :: Natasha Evdokimoff // Images :: Ed Reeve, courtesy of Albion, London

Architecture and furniture design don’t normally coexist. Furniture, in the traditional sense, is meant to go into a specific space and work in a certain way – a dining room table here, an ottoman there, a couch against the longest wall in the living room. Furniture is typically something that fills a space rather than truly occupies it, which is probably why showrooms everywhere are loaded to the rafters with the same old L-shaped sectionals and glass cocktail tables.
David Adjaye, Principal Architect at Adjaye/Associates in London, England has turned the rather mundane nature of furniture design on its head with Monoforms, a series of objects that function as furniture but exist as art.
Known as an architect with an artist’s sensibility and vision, Adjaye was inspired with the idea for Monoforms while traveling in Africa. He began to think about furniture as a collection of stone forms while visiting a quarry in Siwa, southern Egypt – an ancient settlement with an unusually symmetrical mountain range as a backdrop. Adjaye came up with a monolithic group of forms that work both as stand alone objects and together in a number of different configurations. When paired up, the pieces become versatile tables and benches that can be placed indoors or outdoors in virtually any room or space in the home.
Fabricated in two mediums – Hassan Green Granite and solid American Walnut, Monoforms features four group types named after African and Middle Eastern towns where historic events have had monumental human impact: Type I – Giza, Type II – Petra, Type III – Luxor, and Type IV – Galilee. The pieces that comprise each Type have no set structure, yet possess very distinguishable shape. The transformative nature of the series in combination with Adjaye’s selection of weighty materials invites a number of intriguing contrasts: ancient vs modern; indoor vs outdoor; form vs function; natural vs man-made. Adjaye had effectively designed a kind of indoor landscape – one that is understood as furniture although entirely anti-furniture in concept.

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