Fracture sums up this project by Itay Ohaly quite well: a collection of broken-apart benches smashed
down to a series of singular chairs that, seen in sequence, allude strongly to their original form. The tension of parts versus a whole is a common one in architecture, interior and furniture design but this takes the topic to much more visceral and literal places.
Fractures, the designer states, are a part of nature that reflect the past of an object. We are used to seeing things smoothed out, flattened down and refined to the point where an original material form or nature is obfuscated. These furniture objects bring back a sense of the tactile, the literal, the real.
Each object within each fractured furniture set hints at a part of its original – its location within a set of the same cardboard, plastic, plaster or wood material. At the same time, each is more original and unique itself than most pieces of furniture that are intended to be parts of sets but are not really derived from a single form or object.
Moreover, each of these sets tells a different story of its material origins. Plastic deforms in a certain way, wood breaks and splinters in another and concrete or plaster shatter and crack after their own particular fashion. More than just a series of artistic statements these works call into question our (our intentional and) frequent disregard for the most interesting properties of a given furniture-building material.