Brian Lee, the Articulated Furniture Wizard

An architect by qualification, Brian Lee completed his Bachelors from Iowa State University in 2012. After practicing for a few years, he pursued his Masters in Architecture from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2012. He has exhibited his body of work at several occasions like Preserve Iowa Summit Parklet Competition, Cranbrook Academy of Art Graduate Degree Exhibition and Body Fixtures: The Cranbrook Chair Show. He even won several awards for his work. In 2010 he won Third Place in Pulte Homes Design Competition. A year after that he secured First Place in Body Fixtures: The Cranbrook Chair Show. More recently in 2015, he won the Best Parklet of Madison County, Winterset Iowa and Preserve Iowa Summit Parklet Competition.

A unique take on interactive furniture, his articulated seating ‘Wave Bench’ is a seating system that is stimulated by the user. Based on the concept of ‘presence creates form’, this piece changes its form as per the user! The changing form of the bench, provides the flexibility of several seating positions to the user. An extension of his graduate school project, the wave bench is a string of segmented seat sections, jointed in way that allows free motion. When not in use, the bench resembles a machinery or a musical instrument and when in use, it forms a wave pattern around the user. According to users, the feel of the bench is more like a hammock than a bench. The bench is light weight that it changes shape with load of the legs and is comfortable enough for children as well as senior citizens.

Furnitecture, is his series of kinetic pavilions, that is an extension of his Thesis project at Cranbrook Academy of Art. In this, he explores the concept of flexible Pavilion spaces. He utilizes mechanics and weight of human body to change form through the act of sitting. The prototype is very creative and exciting at the same type, with various uses in allied fields of architecture. A user, while describing his experience with it says, “Between the C Wave and T Wave patterns, I can imagine several applications for this type of articulation in interior architecture and further furniture design. I might never be Christopher-Walkin-on-walls cool, but sitting in the walls would still feel pretty groovy.”

The architect has also done a series of furniture studies that are inspired by the incomplete open cubes of Sol LeWitt. He says, “These furniture studies reduce the basic form of an object to a single self-supporting path with the path serving as line, form and structure. Planes are added at areas of interface with the body to provide functionality. The resulting piece of furniture provides an armature for the positioning of the body, where the presence of the body subverts the form and presence of the object.”

This is what the architect has to say about his work – ‘Historically, architecture and its form references the body through abstract geometrical relationships that provide primarily visual cues. In Architecture, the body moves through the static accumulation of visual cues but rarely interacts with the form physically. Current tools of design allow for manipulation of malleable representations of form that are usually realized as static physical objects. My interest is in how digital tools along with analog methods can produce built work that reacts to the environment in ways that resemble the manipulation of digital forms in in digital space. Working through iterations at full scale, the majority of my work has focused on the act of sitting, blurring the boundaries between architecture and furniture in order to dissolve the abstract relationship between architectural form and the body into one of a more direct experiential correlation, questioning architecture as static object and proposing an architecture where form is the direct result of the act of use.’