The reading gets built into the chairs remarkably literally. The time loop becomes a perfect model for New York, a city of constant change where the underlying structure always repeats, and that idea sits right in the ceramic bases, softened and dripping, each drop standing for a single day melting into the next. The foam seats above are the opposite, mortal and designed to break down with use, a nod to Simone de Beauvoir’s Tous les hommes sont mortels and its immortal protagonist watching everything around him decay. One base holds carved cavities for fresh flowers, another wears the tile vernacular of Greenpoint and Williamsburg, and there’s even an opening beneath one seat for Kathleen’s cat Loretta to hide in. The chairs manage to be philosophy, city, and home all at once, without losing their day job as book storage.

There’s also something disarming about how Massimiliano frames the chair itself. For an architect used to the engineers, agencies, and politics of civic work, a chair is a shortcut, fast, economical, and entirely his. A small-scale test of ideas that a building can’t hold as easily.

Read the full interview and explore the chairs below.

You’re an architect who works on the scale of the city, from train stations to high rises. Where does the object-making fit in, and what can a chair do for you that a building can’t?

So far, I have to confess that chairs have been a shortcut to do architecture. The chair is fast, economical, and a lovely terrain to get things wrong or out of your system. You’re agile and not accountable to anyone when you’re making chairs, and those are the biggest advantages; a chair is like an architectural model, a small-scale test of assembly, material strategy, with its thesis that can eventually be carried into a building.

With buildings, especially civic ones, the stakes are different. It’s a privilege to build something for your city. Projects like Penn Station and the major civic infrastructure works that are underway in New York right now have been the most humbling experiences in the profession for me. These projects shape the lives of thousands of people and become part of the city’s history in a permanent way. Their meaning is inseparable from their location – the neighbourhood they sit in bleeds on them and vice versa. The output though, is far less controlled than with a chair because buildings are a collective enterprise. There are a lot of people involved, engineers, contractors, developers, politicians, there are agencies and regulations that steer you one way or another, so much that authorship is diluted (or hopefully it will be soon as we exit the era of the archistar).

Ironically, in spite of this de facto “diluted setup” there are very few architects who have actually managed, or even aspired, to efface themselves. Will Alsop, WIP Collaborative, Assemble, and Giancarlo De Carlo’s anarchic participatory approach are strong western precedents, but control has been the dominant attitude. And it makes sense: in order to shape something coherent and extremely specific, you sometimes do want control.

Control has many faces. It can be a symptom of clear uncompromising vision or it can be the manifestation of insecurity. When it serves the work, it tends to be the former. When it serves the author, I’d say it’s most likely the latter.

Authorial control aside, what’s certain is that, in my experience dealing with smaller objects like chairs has allowed for more control over the process and outcome. The fewer interferences make the relationship between intent and execution much more direct, and it’s useful to be in this in vitro context where you can focus on one thing only.

The chairs came out of a conversation with Kathleen about Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume. How did that book’s ideas about time and repetition end up shaping the actual forms?

Kat gave me Balle’s book. I read it right away and was hooked. I was redesigning her apartment and had asked her if there were any readings that had recently resonated with her. With residential projects, I always start with the client’s world and interests. You bring that into the process before you start iterating so that these conversations and the topics that occupy their minds can manifest in the objects that will surround them at home. It’s a straightforward way of embedding meaning into the built environment.

In this case, the book became the project’s point of entry. On the Calculation of Volume is a mind-bending metaphysical novel where the protagonist slips out of chronological time and begins to live through November 18th again and again in an infinite loop – a condition that somehow felt familiar to both Kat and I. That time cycle is a good model for New York because the city feels like constant change without real escape from its rigid patterns. Every day is full of new events, people, crises, errands, yet the underlying structure repeats: pay more, store more, want more, survive again.

To capture that repetition and the blurring of time that results from it, the ceramic base is softened, dripping, partially liquefied. The individual finite daily units of time – the monads that every “drop” in the armature stands for – are melting into one another.

There’s a real contrast in the materials, the permanent ceramic base against the foam that breaks down over time. How did you land on that pairing, and what were you after with the tiled, almost melted look of the base?

The composition of the materials and this contrast you mention are the Leitmotiv of the book. A solid structure of a same day repeating indefinitely versus the protagonist’s linear timeline and varied experience of decaying. I like that juxtaposition, it works spatially too: in repetition you can get lost because everything looks the same, in change you cannot because all is unique.

You are actually touching on one of the subjects that I have been studying most: the isomorphic design process. Isomorphism in design is the practice of mapping the formal or organisational properties of an object “A” onto another object “B”. It very much revolves around the question of how you translate things from one medium to another. Here, the source object “A” is a Solvej Balle text, while the host object “B” is the chair. Of course, the modalities of that act of translation are up to infinite debate.

In that sense, isomorphism is part of a broader narrative approach that sits in the lineage of figures like Peter Eisenman and Giuseppe Terragni, whose work used architecture as a medium through which to engage ideas beyond architecture itself. You only have to look at House II and the Danteum – it’s giving Dante Divina Commedia and Noam Chomsky Deep Structure. The point is that a chair, a building, or any designed object can become a vehicle for thought. They can all be related to politics, language, or certain social conditions. They can even be reflexive and look inwards at design culture itself.

The important thing with all this is not to think that talking about something means having the ability to impact it. The failure in much discourse these days is confusing the two. A lot of architecture today claims to have agency. Buildings that claim to challenge this or that, buildings that prophetically subvert capitalism or alter power dynamics, when in fact they are inert and unequipped to change such societal matters. So I do my best to refrain from making statements like: “The plan liberates the subject, the façade demands participation, the building resists patriarchal hierarchies.” Because, do they? Really?

You worked with a ceramicist in Veneto, where your family is from. What was that process like, and how hands-on were you in making them?

I had quite frankly never really made the most of my region, until recently. A project for a rural house close to Verona came up and forced me to look into local craftsmanship and the available mediums. Whether you are working with the red Verona marble, the ceramics in Bassano del Grappa, or the Murano glassmakers, there’s just an incredible range of expertise in the region. With craft of this level, I delegate immensely to those who know better than me. We come to the table with ideas, they push back with hard execution knowledge, and ultimately this lands us in a happy middle ground.

What’s fascinating is the odd mixture of superb, old arcane techniques and high-tech. Robotic arms or 5-axis CNC, and then scalpels with geometries never-before-seen to hand-finish. You can’t tell if it’s nostalgia, spirituality or genuine concern for quality that compels them not to eradicate certain practices.


Photos by Cristina Colussi