Tyres, walking frames and branches from New York's public parks are among the materials salvaged to form 24 chairs, as part of an exhibition that Marta gallery and auction house Catalog Sale are hosting inside an abandoned Chinatown building for NYCxDesign.
The Make-Do project pairs a dozen newly commissioned pieces from local studios with a dozen historical chairs curated by Catalog Sale and created between the 1880s and 2010s.
Sourced from all over the US, these archival pieces are examples of impromptu seating designs by anonymous everyday people that were born out of necessity and circumstance, such as an armchair made from stacked tyres in a California car repair shop.
Make-Do features a mix of contemporary and archival chairs. Photo by Avi Kovacevich To encourage this same ad-hoc approach for the new commissions, Marta and Catalog Sale devised an almost game show-style format, asking 12 New York studios to make a chair in only three days ? with one day dedicated to material sourcing, one for planning and the last for building.
"It's interesting because it prompts a designer or an artist to prize materials that they have on hand," Marta co-founder Benjamin Critton told Dezeen. "So taking things that are unloved or under-loved and giving them a new life."
"For us, it was also an opportunity to engage specifically with New York-based designers, who we find often have to make do in many ways."
Isabel Rower's Box Chair (far left) resembles a f...