3B Chair Projects at Come Up to My Room

Two 3B chair projects will be featured at the Gladstone Hotel’s 10th Annual Come Up to My Room (CUTMR) Event: a chair for Jorge Luis Borges by Aidan Mitchelmore and Andrew Ashbury and a chair for Jiro Ono by Haley Zhou and Lauren Tom. In both cases, digital fabrication made the designs possible.

The poetry and short stories of Jorge Luis Borges are often driven by complex philosophical themes such as labyrinths, dreams, recursion, and infinity. Taking Borges’s stories as inspiration for our chair design, we experimented with various interlocking puzzles based on repeating geometries. The design forms a compound, three-axis, self-locking lattice particularly evocative of the infinite hexagonal shafts of Borges’s Library of Babel.

Jiro has an obsession, it keeps him up at night and makes him get up every morning to work at the age of 86. He is obsessed with making sushi. Ono is described as a shokunin – a person who embodies the artisan spirit of relentless pursuit of perfection through his craft. His perfection is expressed in a 19-sushi menu, he does not serve any other type of food and an apprentice for Jiro would work for ten years before attempting to make an egg sushi. There is a blend of the traditional and the modern in the Japanese aesthetic. Jiros’ sushi are a result of thousands of attempts and the fine balance between detail and simplicity. He changes the proportions of his meals to suit each customer in order to maintain the pace of their meal. Every step of the experience is carefully choreographed. Perfection is demanded, from the rice dealer to the body temperature the sushi rice must be served at. All these must fit like pieces of a puzzle or it would not pass Jiros’ near-impossible standards. To Jiro he is still seeking perfection, to “continue to climb, trying to reach the top. But no one knows where the top is.”

Come Up to my Room is the Gladstone Hotel’s annual alternative design event.

The exhibition will be open on Thursday January 24 from 6-8pm, Friday January 25 from 11am-8pm, Saturday January 26 from 11am-10pm, and Sunday January 27 11am-5pm.