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SIMULACRA
Linde Freya Tangelder's Low Chair in cast aluminium, a single angular seat standing against a board-formed concrete wall below a strip window.

Photograph by Lindefreya0610. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. The stored file is the unmodified 3750×5000 original; responsive presentation may crop the image for layout.

PHOTOGRAPH Lindefreya0610 / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Destroyers/Builders

Linde Freya Tangelder · contemporary

OVERVIEW

The practice of Linde Freya Tangelder, founded in 2014 and working between Antwerp and Brussels. The objects are furniture, but the vocabulary is architectural: columns, lintels, plinths and reveals reduced to the size of a chair.

Materials are mixed high and low deliberately, cast aluminium against lacquered timber, waxed stone against brass, with the hand's marks left in the finish rather than sanded out.

WHY IT MATTERS

Contemporary collectible design that turns brushed metal and primitive mass into quiet, highly refined furniture.

CONTEXT

Tangelder trained at Design Academy Eindhoven. The studio describes its subject as an interaction between furniture and architectural elements, materials or building techniques, which is an unusually precise statement of intent for the field.

The work circulates through galleries and collaborations rather than catalogue production: a chair shown with Kassl Editions at Paris Photo, the Wax Stone Light made for Cassina in Milan in 2023.

WHAT TO NOTICE

  1. 01Furniture at building scaleLook for the architectural element being quoted: a column base, a lintel, a stepped plinth. The pieces are small buildings before they are seats.
  2. 02The hand is left visibleFinishes are worked rather than machined. Tool marks and unevenness are part of the surface and are not corrected.
  3. 03Two materials, one jointMost pieces set one heavy material against one refined one and show exactly where they meet.
  4. 04Lit from one sideIn the studio's own photography the objects are raked by a single light. The facets are the subject, so the shadow is doing the describing.

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