Sketching Objects
A chair from Maria Jeglinksa-Adamczewska's outdoor furniture collection Flaner (image: Robert-Swierczynski).
Sketches are more than just the initial strokes of a pen in designer Maria Jeglinska-Adamczewska’s Flaner, an outdoor metal furniture collection created for cafés and restaurants. In fact, the drawings seem to materialise off the page. Even where the collection’s slats and tabletops present a more industrial silhouette, they end in natural, rounded edges, as though they have been drawn into life, while the chair’s legs continue up into the metal frame like the single dash of a pen.
Jeglinska-Adamczewska began Flaner by sketching out her memories of different pieces of outdoor furniture, a tool she uses to access recognisable typographies before using them to draw something new. “I didn’t really research, which I usually tend to,” she explains. “For this collection, however, it was about working from memory, almost like you would sample images.” As a result of this methodology, she explains, Flaner sought to blend traditional forms with more contemporary elements which her sketching hand could find.
The results are solid steel tabletops paired with robust, slatted chairs that retain a familiar graphic silhouette. Unexpectedly, however, the tabletops end in delicate, lipped edges as though covered by a tablecloth, and the slats have gentle, rounded ends that wrap around a metal frame. The arc of the legs recalls a curved tree branch, or a heron poised to take a step. These details breathe life into the metal, and make the pieces appear soft to the touch. “The idea was to contrast two elements,” Jeglinska-Adamczewska explains, with Flaner playing with different relationships between organic and geometric forms.
Bringing these drawings to life, however, brought technical challenges. Flaner is produced by MDD, a Polish manufacturer that primarily creates office furniture, and Jeglinska-Adamczewska explains that a process of drawing and redrawing was required to calibrate the collection to make the most of MDD’s capabilities. “The idea was to reduce the number of elements to the minimum,” she says, thereby simplifying the manufacturing process by reusing and repeating elements across the design. The bent tabletops and curved legs, for example, are only angled to a minimal degree, with these angles then repeated across the collection.
Jeglinska-Adamczewska says that reducing and replicating design elements allows each component to naturally impose upon and determine others. The curvature of the Flaner chairs’ legs, for instance, is repeated in its seat and backrest. Though made from steel, the slats end up looking like strips of fabric, as though they might dip under the weight of a person. In this way, the different pieces of Flaner track the progress of Jeglinska-Adamczewska’s line drawings, their forms carved out and refined by sketching to produce a playful mixture of curves and geometry. To sit within the curved slats of the chair, or the bench, where steel bends softly like leaf tips, is to sit within those original drawings. It is to experience sketches come to life.
Words Amy Woolfenden
Photographs Robert Swierczynski