500 Stools

Our primary thinking of a folly relies on its pure decoration and sometimes extravagant expression that transcends the normal range of a garden or a mundane building to which it belongs.
Our response to this project, is to use everyday, domestic ideas in a playful, unconventional way that seeks to engage the community with the context of the environment. One stool is individual and it is possible that it will have zero impact as an architectural element. To build a folly, not with 500 bricks, but with 500 stools, our idea of a folly is transform through the medium of a mundane object, which has a meaning that everyone understands and has experienced.

This project started three years ago without realizing it. The lack of conceptual framework within the commercial architecture that we practice and the need to build and create things, pushed us to generate a space where we could conceptualize and practice a hybrid between architecture and industrial design. Our studio allows us to emulate fabrication process and material used in traditional architecture on a smaller scale. 

Materials like concrete, wood, acrylic, metal, resins, and glass applied in small and simple objects like a stool. But beyond fascination with objects, the real intention is to practice architecture on a different scale, hoping to build what is habitable. This proposal reflects a long process of ongoing experimentation and exploration of architecture through small objects. The 500 stools will be fabricated in our studio using our CNC tools, 3/4î plywood, and then transported to the site to assemble an initial state of a ìfollyî that will be subverted, transformed, and adapted by its users and Socratesís Park public programs. Given the dual nature of scales in this project (one single stool or a 500 stool folly), 500 stools will remain present as whole or fragmented into individual. All the stools will carryma serial number 1 to 500 and date. Users will be welcome to take home a stool as a souvenir of this architectural expression or stools could be donated to the Socratesís Park or a public school in need.