i.1. Common Dimensions
Website (Research Platform)
Common Dimensions
Common Dimensions is a research platform and print publication that approaches the subject of the chair by asking deceptively obtuse questions: what makes a chair a chair? Ought a chair be defined as any object one can sit on? If so, isn’t a carpet a chair? What about a horse?
This project investigates the chair as a symbolic, discursive, and designed object in order to explore its broad and diverse expressions: the chair as architecture, the chair as status symbol, the chair as prosthesis, the chair as locus of power, the chair as a tool. Common Dimensions offers no decisive definition of the chair as a singular, fixed object. Instead, it seeks to expand our understanding of (and connection to) chairs through a collection of interviews with artists, designers, and collectors, an ever-expanding online visual archive, and a growing database of texts that both enlarge upon and complicate the topic.
While much of this project inhabits the digital space, each interview is also published in a unique format that seeks to embody the key themes and ideas contained within it.
Print Issue No. 1 — Dis/Assembly
Print Issue No. 2 — Repair
Print Issue No. 3 — Dust Chair