Kawara Chair

DESIGN: Tsuyoshi Hayashi

Japan/Netherlands

make me! 2014

Designed “Kawara Chair” as his graduation project in 2012. The inspiration for the project was traditional Japanese architecture and wood joinery. “Kawara Chair” is designed to salvage industrially rejected Japanese roof top tiles that would otherwise be discarded. Because of ceramic property, it is difficult to avoid generating defectives and hard to recycle them once fired.  Even though it has still unique value such as color and shape, more than 65,000 pieces of roof tiles are yearly discarded just because of tiny defectives. In the end, roof tile factories produce valuable waste and pay a lot for disposal. Tsuyoshi believed “useless wastes” can be rendered to “useful matter” once again by just cutting off only the damaged part and mounting them into a wooden structure. This is why and how, he designed “Kawara Chair”. Each roof tile seating of “Kawara Chair” can fit to the wooden structure by just mounting it without glue or nails. That enables people to replace or change colors of seating as they wish. In project these materials were used: cut-off roof tiles as seating and wooden chair structure such as oak, cherry maple and ebony.