“Can you squeeze a chair out of a machine, the way you squeeze toothpaste out of a tube?” THOMAS HEATHERWICK
The present bench is the second extrusion by Thomas Heatherwick from a single billet of aluminium. The ‘Extrusion’ series is the result of eighteen-year quest by Thomas Heatherwick to find a machine capable of creating a ‘limitless’ single component piece of furniture. At the time of production, the ‘Extrusions’ were made using the world’s largest extrusion machine, working with technology used in the aerospace industry to allow the designer to form an entire bench out of metal in one extrusion.
As the aluminium is forced through a large die, it results in a single, endless projection of a seat profile random, gnarled beginning and ending. The Extrusion collection only produced approximately 25 metres of extruded forms in total, each one unique and unrepeatable.
With the ‘Extrusion’ series, Heatherwick chose to partly focus on an uncelebrated by-product of the extrusion process by deliberately taking these random gnarled beginnings and endings which are usually the discarded off-cuts and deliberately rejoiced in their strange, uncontrollable forms reminiscent of a light brush stroke. Each piece of aluminium was polished for 300 hours to achieve a mirror finish.
Thomas Heatherwick is an English contemporary designer based in London who uses a multi-disciplinary approach across architecture, engineering, sculpture, furniture and product development in his practice. His works are informed by emotion, and especially his architecture projects, are shaped by a desire to instill joy with a human quality while avoiding rigidity and over-specialisation.