Dezeen Magazine

Snarkitecture's Slip chair features wonky legs and a slanted seat

Snarkitecture has designed a chair for Portuguese brand UVA that features a wooden frame that is seemingly slipping onto its side.

New York studio Snarkitecture designed the Slip chair to appear unusable, giving it a wonky structure topped with a marble seat.

Working alongside craftspeople from Paços de Ferreira in the north of Portugal, the designers built a frame from white ash wood.

To counteract its leaning frame, the piece of stone forming the seat was sliced at an angle – evening out its surface.

"Slip Chair is a wooden chair that appears to be sinking into the ground," UVA, a newly founded Portuguese brand that focuses on pairing designers with local craftspeople.

"The apparently opposed elements of the chair are counterbalanced through the monolithic volume of the stone," continued the designers. "The chair revolves upon two axes and the suggested unsteadiness of the sliding forms conceals the complete stability of Slip."

Each chair, crafted in the artisans' workshops, is numbered and certified as a totally handmade item.

While the first iteration of the chair is made from white ash and black marble, the brand plans to release different versions using a range of materials.

Snarkitecture was founded in 2008 by designers Daniel Arsham and Alex Mustonen.

Since then, the duo has worked on a wide range of projects including shop fit-outs, large-scale installations, clothing collaborations.

Recently, they placed a glowing chamber for displaying "elite footwear" at the centre of streetwear brand Kith's West Hollywood store and created a range of kitchen islands based on glaciers, rivers and geysers for materials company Caesarstone.

Photography is by Root Studio.