In April 2003, as is the case every year, tens of thousands of buyers, sellers and browsers from around the world gathered in Milan, Italy at the Salone del Mobile. While those attending the massive fair heralded the design industry's latest and greatest contributions to our culture of consumption, nearby a local design gallery offered a refreshing change of pace.

Opos is an alternative gallery known for displaying some of today's boldest designs, and the piece shown alone in the gallery that April, created by Spanish designer Martín Ruiz de Azúa, was no exception. In the otherwise empty gallery space, Ruiz de Azúa's Human Chair was displayed as a single image of a group of people sitting on each other's knees forming a tight circle. Propped one on top of the other in friendship and fragile dependency, the group smiled and waved as their photograph was taken.

Ruiz de Azúa is known to slowLab for several other slow designs like his Basic House, a portable personal space for contemplation, and Tache Naturelle, a series of one-of-a-kind clay pots individually colored by nature, but this project is our personal favorite. The title of the piece says it all: It is *human*, referring not only to the people who are its component parts, but more importantly to the delicate nature of the exercise. At any moment, the 'chair' could collapse, but then it could just as easily be rebuilt again, perhaps with a few more friends joining in. With this simple project, Ruiz de Azúa has given the precious gift of immaterial substance to our over-material world: a design 'object' that has no object unless people work together to create it in amity and fun.

Martín Ruiz de Azúa projects >