Words Marisa Bartolucci

www.nendo.jp/en/

This Tokyo-based design firm is making waves with its insight and verve.

In 2002 two old school chums, Oki Sato and Akihiro Ito, just out of grad school—architecture and business respectively—traveled to Milan with a few other friends to visit the furniture fair. The young men were so taken by what they saw, they decided to set up their own design firm, led by Oki. Within a few short years, Nendo was designing furniture for Cappellini and De Padova. Last March, for XXIst Century Man, an exhibition in Tokyo curated by Issey Miyake, Nendo created the artless Cabbage chair out of a roll of the wastepaper used to pleat the fabrics for Miyake’s Pleats Please by slicing it and peeling the layers back. The resin added to the paper for production gives the chair a springy elasticity that makes for comfortable sitting. Then in April, the firm designed the Elastic Diamond installation for Lexus at the Milan furniture fair. As part of the exhibition, Nendo introduced the high-tech Diamond chair produced through selective laser sintering (SLS), a form of 3-D printing. Inspired by the atomic structure of the diamond, both the installation and the chair expand and contract, expressing the fusion of opposing elements like “strong but flexible” that epitomize the L-Finesse design concept of Lexus. This spring Fulcrum asked Akihiro Ito to elaborate on a few facets of Nendo’s story.

Nendo seperated the different working areas of its office with partitions resembling sagging curtains.

SB: Nendo somehow manages to capture that essential aspect of technology that is most poetic. They represent the next wave of what I consider to be the New Transparency of Japanese design: simple gestures that mask their complexity in minimalist beauty.

What at the Milan fair so excited you and Sato?

We were impressed that the designers and designs were so free. That is what we wanted to be.

Why the name Nendo?

The word in Japanese refers to clay, a material easily molded. We want to design projects in a way that is flexible and free.

Your work seems to possess a poetry that is almost haikulike. Is this intentional?

Our design is very similar to the Japanese sports aikido and judo where players use their opponent’s power. We too use something that the client already has. I also feel haiku is very similar. In haiku, people feel and capture some scene from everyday life and write something in short words. As we like to say, our designs are about giving people a small “!” moment. There are so many small “!” moments hidden in our everyday. But we don’t recognize them. Or even when we do, we tend to forget what we’ve seen.

Your office is quite unusual. Tell me about the wavy partitions.

To maintain a connection between the different functions of the office—conference, management, work space, storage—we divided the walls with partitions that seem to sag like loose cloth, enclosing the spaces more than dividers but less than walls.

The partitions slope low in the corridors, so they can be stepped over, but does your staff ever trip?

Actually when we moved here, it happened a few times, but now we all know how to step over them.

Another forgotten (!) moment.

The Cabbage chair is made out of a roll of the wastepaper used to pleat the fabrics for Miyake’s Pleats Please line. The resin added to the paper for production gives the chair a springy elasticity that makes for comfortable sitting. Nendo hopes to sell the compact roll for the buyer to cut open and peel back into a seat.

The Diamond chair is made of polyamide particles transformed into a hard mold through selective laser sintering (SLS). This RP technology enables the parts needed to support the user to be fabricated with extra thickness, making the chair both flexible and strong. It is produced in two sections, and snaps together. As it takes several days to manufacture, Nendo imagines that orders could be fulfilled by sending the chair’s data to a local RP manufacturer, which would then produce it.

Photos Diamond chair and Cabbage chair, Masayuki Hayashi