Golden A' Design Award Winner 2022
Emerging from the intersection of craft tradition and sculptural innovation, the O3Connect Stool by Chung Sheng Chen represents a remarkable meditation on material potential and formal invention within contemporary furniture design. The work demonstrates how leather, typically employed as upholstery or surface treatment, might instead serve as primary structural element, its inherent flexibility and tensile strength exploited to create self-supporting three-dimensional form. The designer appears to have drawn upon mathematical principles of continuous surfaces and topological transformation, evoking associations with Möbius strips and trefoil knots while maintaining practical seating function through the integration of a stable wooden platform at the form's gravitational center. The technical achievement merits particular attention: three separate leather bands must be precisely cut, curved, and joined to create the interlocking structure, requiring exceptional understanding of material behavior under compound stress and meticulous attention to connection points where structural integrity depends upon craft precision. The cognac coloration suggests vegetable-tanned leather that will develop increased character through use, participating in design traditions that value patina and temporal transformation as aesthetic enrichment rather than deterioration. The presentation of two stools in varying orientations invites consideration of the form's multivalent legibility, how a single design reads differently according to viewing angle and how paired objects create spatial and visual relationships extending beyond individual identity. One might observe connections to organic modernist precedents, to the flowing forms of Aalto bentwood or the sculptural investigations of the Eameses, yet the O3Connect achieves something genuinely distinctive in its radical reconception of leather as architectural material. The work invites extended contemplation regarding the boundaries between furniture and sculpture, between functional object and aesthetic proposition, suggesting that the most compelling design often emerges precisely at such categorical intersections.
The stool with beautiful hollow bracing structure managed from the interlocking three circular curvature by laminated wood bending into shape, Using natural wood bending and multi-layer pressurized shaping technology, showing the elasticity and toughness of natural materials, covering with high quality of hand stitching leather. Warm and smooth visually and yet sturdy and strong to holds weight up to 140kg.