My name is Konstantin Gobsic, I'm an industrial designer, my studio is in Munich and we're
here in Barbasso in Milan for the 2013 furniture fair.
My collaboration with Emiko started with the Parish Art Museum project, a museum designed
by Herzegum de Moron and they involved me in the project to be responsible for anything
that was the furniture scope of the museum.
The chair was part of the furniture that we designed for the museum but unlike the other
things that were more purpose-built, a chair is a much more universal product that I felt
we needed a company to support the development of the project.
Emiko stands for chairs in aluminium and aluminium was the perfect material for the chair that
we had in mind because the museum in this part of the States, Long Island is very open
and aluminium was a kind of a good material for us to use.
Everything is mechanically joined to a central core, a piece of die-cast aluminium which
is really the heart of the chair, it sits underneath the seat and for tubular legs just
joined to that core and the armrest, backrest.
So we have one moulded piece that kind of solves all the structure of the chair and
the seat can be exchangeable, we can have a post-it seat, plastic seat, wooden seat.
We've designed a small system if you want which enables us to make two different chairs,
a high kind of normal cafe chair version and a low, more reclined lounge chair around the
same joint.
Emiko is most famous for the navy chair which is a very handcrafted chair even though it
has been produced in huge quantity.
For me it felt like doing a new chair for Emiko we shouldn't actually, I felt we should
actually change the way they make chairs, we should industrialise it, simplify it, eliminate
all the dirty work, all the hand labour and that's what really informed the concept of
the chair.
So involving Emiko into this real shift in their way of producing a chair and of course
they will always produce the navy chair in the way they produce it but I think now we've
just established another form of production inside their company.
