Transit Chairs by Boris Bally, image courtesy outdoorz gallery

Transit Table by Boris Bally, image courtesy outdoorz gallery

Well known American artist Boris Bally's Transit Chairs are both witty and innovative.  The transformation of  recycled street signs  celebrate a raw American street-aesthetic. The unique markings and patina were earned on the road. Created with the precision of Boris' skill as a sculptor, jeweler and industrial designer, the pure lines of the chair perfectly offset the graphics of the recycled signage. Each edge is rounded to a smooth finish. Transit chairs are made individually (based on current signage stock) in Boris' studio, NO two chairs are alike. The stainless steel hardware is rust proof. Recycled champagne corks inserted on the bottom of all chair legs protect floors and provide added stability.

Transit chairs are dismounted for easy shipping and come with easy to follow instructions, all hardware, including an easy to use hex wrench.

Public collections of Bally’s work include London's V&A Museum, Museum of Art & Design, Carnegie Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Renwick Gallery and Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum

+ Materials: recycled traffic signs, champagne corks (chair foot protectors), steel hardware
+ Techniques: Hand fabricated, pierced, brake-formed, finished

This chair is available for sale in outdoorzgallery.

+ All images courtesy outdoorz gallery

Reflective Natural, is a recent completed project by Italian architect studio Vudafieri Saverino Partners. It is a contemporary dolmen expanding the boundaries between architecture and growing nature. This small artifact has been conceived for the exhibition focused on relation between Man-Architecture-Enviroment: CULTURE_NATURE important collateral event during the actually ongoing 12th edition of Venice Architecture Biennale.

Our wish for nature is that it be imitated, depicted, protected, but also that it recover its role as a departure point for new, eclectic, innovative relationships between human beings and their environment.

Tiziano Vudafieri and Claudio Saverino, founders of Vudafieri Saverino Partners

Reflective Natural, image courtesy Vudafieri Saverino Partners

+ Project description courtesy Vudafieri Saverino Partners

Reflective Natural, natural reflection and natural reflected, is a project that delves into cultural simulation, the ambivalence of the human milieu considered as an objective architectural space and equally an intimate subjective space. It is the outcome of a conceptual notion that envisages architecture as "hyper-nature."

Here we observe a sort of "contemporary dolmen", comprising five reflecting surfaces constructed like a house of cards. The exterior structure reflects surrounding nature, while the interiors are covered with climbing plants. In this way the space is enclosed but its boundaries are undefined, its geometries distorted, and sun and water can enter here. Within, the floor appears as a meadow, reflecting on the walls and ceiling. Outside, the walls become extensions of the sky.

Thus the artificial space is inverted: while nature invades the inner space of the psyche, which is personal and private, the conceptual and mimetic external space loses its architectural solidity and fades away into light and immaterial landscape.

Reflective Natural, image courtesy Vudafieri Saverino Partners

In some measure the project upends the traditional antagonism between the natural and the artificial, between nature and architecture. The "interior vegetation" will grow and overrun the walls, while the architecture will be subject to cyclical changes, as the days and seasons pass, retrieving an ancient approach for capturing living space.

These reflections are now a reality thanks to the enthusiasm of the partner Il Bisonte, an Italian brand of chic, crafted small leather goods, on the same wavelength as Reflective Natural and quick to support its fulfilment.

Reflective Natural, image courtesy Vudafieri Saverino Partners

The sophisticated simplicity of this "contemporary dolmen", its intimate involvement with its surroundings, its lithe, spirited interaction with humanity and nature, are in perfect unison with brand's fundamental values. As an icon of this shared vision stands the seating bench designed by Tiziano Vudafieri and Claudio Saverino with Saporiti Italia. A game of woven bands using the precious leathers from Il Bisonte invites to contemplation symbolically hanging while wrapped in nature. Il Bisonte creations tend to the essential: minimalist lines moulded to the human form, which take on a patina over the years, a soft testimony of the passing of time.

Reflective Natural, image courtesy Vudafieri Saverino Partners

A tale of the accord that exists between human life and the habitat where it is welcomed, made possible by taking as appropriate and by a prudent elaboration of nature's resources, experienced as an intimate complicity with the cycles and mutations of time.

A low-key, contemporary aesthetic, open to the world that can be surprised or even overwhelmed by nature: the quest for new equilibrium with our environment.

+ Project credits / data

Project: Reflective Natural
Design: Vudafieri Saverino Partners | Tiziano Vudafieri and Claudio Saverino
Sponsor: Il Bisonte
Supplier: Bianchi Fratelli, Saporiti Italia
Green design: Alessandro Nasti
Structural design: Paolo Giustini

+ About Vudafieri Saverino Partners

Envisioning spaces always looking for a Story in empathy with who will inhabit them, is the peculiar approach of studio Vudafieri Saverino Partners since years.

In line with the Milanese tradition of the "creative atelier", the work of Tiziano Vudafieri and Claudio Saverino embraces architecture, retail design, interior design and decoration.

High-end stores, large private homes, restaurants, residential and business architecture are therefore addressed in terms of Concept Design, Client Identity, and Narration Strategy, combining architectural culture and personal sensitivity to contemporary trends in design, fashion and art; dialectically and transversally transmuting their knowledge contents.

Since 2000, a substantial portion of the Firm's activity has been devoted to retail design projects, mostly for leading luxury prêt-àporter brands. At the same time, Vudafieri Saverino Partners is also engaged in major projects in architecture (residential, private and public, commercial and industrial), and interior design (homes, exhibition areas, offices).

Vudafieri Saverino Partners has worked on projects in almost all the countries of Europe, United States, China, Japan, South East Asia, the Middle East, Russia and Eastern Europe.