R2 Silicon Foam Chair by Aranda\Lasch

Aranda\Lasch is a New York and Tucson-based architectural studio dedicated to experimental research and innovative building. Established in 2003 by Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch, the studio designs buildings, installations and objects through a deep investigation of materials and structure. Their early architectural projects are the subject of the book, Pamphlet Architecture #27: Tooling. Aranda\Lasch has exhibited their work internationally in galleries and institutions dealing with design and architecture. In 2008, they were commissioned by the MoMA in New York to produce a large-scale installation in the museum. They collaborated with Matthew Ritchie on The Morning Line on a work commissioned by TBA-21 that has travelled to Venice, Seville, Istanbul and Vienna. In addition to commercial and residential projects in New York, they completed a 42,000 square foot temporary structure for Design Miami in 2008 & 2009. Aranda\Lasch were featured in both recent 2008 and 2010 Venice Architecture Biennials.

“Their work—from the 2003 Brooklyn Pigeon Project to their recent Pamphlet Architecture publication Tooling—is characterized by both rigor and whimsy. Like scientists, they are committed to an exhaustive investigation of structures and systems that will enable them to discover new variations in form and surface that they can transform into architecture.” - 2007 United States Artists Fellows description of Aranda\Lasch. Recognition includes the United States Artists Award, Young Architects Award, Design Vanguard Award, AD Innovators, and the Architectural League Emerging Voices Award. Their work is part of the permanent collection of the MoMA in New York. Aranda\Lasch continually develops experimental furniture products that explore new concepts in fabrication and assembly.

Railing Series is a new collection of furniture pieces designed by Aranda\Lasch. The first three elements of the collection includes R1, R2 & R3: two chairs and a stool.

Railing is an exploration of structural modular loops that are upholstered like handle-grips to become furniture. Each piece of furniture is a single loop made up of many circles. Here, the circle does not display the qualities it is most known for, but it is what a circle can be. It is not whole or complete but is instead growing into itself. It is a circle that refuses its own dimension and finitude, that struggles to be endless.

The Railing collection continues Aranda\Lasch’s research into modularity through a novel language of arcs. Though the pieces in the collection vary in size, shape, function and complexity, each one carries the same logic of a single line that curves through a lattice of fractal circles and comes back to itself to form a continuous loop.