Furniture

BRUTUS CHAIR

The BassamFellows Brutus chair, launched in Milan in 2020, has its roots in the powerful Modernist vernacular of Perriand and Jeanneret, but is softer and visually lighter. It emphasizes certain sculptural elements, elevating visual aspects evident in much Brutalist design, but updated with an organic smoothness. It is more “cut” than it is “built”, and its shape looks like it has been weathered naturally and then manipulated – the silhouette of the back suggests a giant shell that has been machined to create a striking squared-off hole in the center. The back and seat look like a single sculptural element, the horizontal and vertical planes meeting with pleasing curves. The Vienna caning of the seat in some examples of the chair (others are upholstered with suspension webbing) draws a line back to 1950s Chandigarh, and contributes to the visual and physical lightness of the object. Like Jeanneret’s work in India, the Brutus chair is something strong and solid, but in this case perspective is everything – the legs are elliptical, tapering down from the seat to the floor, and shaped like a rounded shark’s fin, so they look broad from one angle, and remarkably thin from another. As with the BassamFellows Tractor Stool, the legs are inserted directly into the seat with a large tenon.

The Brutus chairs are designs for now, when the Brutalist tendencies of Le Corbusier et al are again in the collective consciousness of the design world. They are designs with personality – “kawaii” as the Japanese say. “Chairs are not just utilitarian objects, they have to have personality, they have to be loved,” says Craig Bassam. Remarkably, the idea for Brutus came from a dream that designer Craig Bassam had – he woke at 3am one morning and sketched out Brutus in significant detail. It came from something subconscious, and appeared fully realized on paper. It is a design shaped by instinct.

SHARE +