I don’t always create a chair from scratch; inspiration is not exclusive. I take things I see and modify them based on the concepts I know and stand for. Almost everything is subject to stimuli I find in magazines, Instagram, travels, or on the streets. Everyday life generates broad perspectives.
In 2019, when we were at Wanted Design NY, I passed by an antique store. It was full of chairs, and I started to look around and came across these. A folding chair, there were several, but this pair was special. Since it could be folded, I assumed it would be easy to carry as luggage on the plane. I bought a pair and brought them to Santa Marta, thinking of a story. From Brooklyn to Santa Marta. By the way, I have a fixation with stackable, foldable, and modifiable furniture.
I took them for a stroll in Brooklyn and took a couple of photos with my Pentax K1000 and an HP5 film that later made its way to Chengue.
I like the idea of a folding chair, for its look and convenience. I feel it generates a sense of practical occupation, something like a quick meal in a chair. I thought that with a foldable chair, it would be possible to ship them by plane to make everything easier and flood Brooklyn with Tucurinca chairs. This was the idea at that time, and the inspiration came from various sources:
- The aesthetics of the chair
- Functionality, easy to transport, practical. A need for Tucurinca to reach further.
- A good story. From Brooklyn to Santa Marta.
I brought a pair and we made a prototype that took us a long time. The challenge with this chair was that we had to manufacture almost every screw. Every component was made from scratch, and they weren’t readily available, at least not in Santa Marta. In the end, the chair turned out to be excessively expensive. So, it ended up being a chair with a subtle perception of practicality but costly. Additionally, the original chair is made of aluminum, and we worked with steel, which is not exactly starting from scratch. This made the prototype weigh about three times as much as the original. At this point in 2019, I buried the idea of the model.
The week before the lockdown, I had another idea. Take the design of the folding chair but make it non-folding but stackable. It was different from the original idea, but I could embrace the aesthetics and add some functionality while omitting the complicated part.
In October, we wrote another chapter. A new Tucurinca chair: A-chair-from-NY.
A chair that looks foldable but is not foldable, a chair like fast food but good, easy but refined, a Tucurinca version of the chair I brought from New York, a journey that, while modifying the model, does not transform its origin.
