Chair exhibition at TU Delft

Exhibitions

The extensive chair collection of TU Delft's architecture faculty which was nearly destroyed in a fire, has finally been given pride of place at the school’s new home.

By Editor Design.nl /asdf 14-10-2010

When a fire burnt down the faculty of architecture at the Technical University in Delft in 2008, the famous chair collection was the only thing to be saved. Now, two years on, the collection has been given centre stage in a permanent exhibition designed by Kossmann.dejong.

The architecture faculty, otherwise known as BK city (a reference to the Dutch word for architecture) is housed today in the former headquarters of the university, at the Julianalaan. Funding from Stichting Sofa, a foundation that promotes contemporary furniture, has assisted in allowing the faculty’s renowned chair collection to be finally put back on display since the fire.

A challenge was finding the space to exhibit such a large collection of contemporary chairs but the choice fell on a hallway leading up to the library. Exhibition architects Kossmann.dejong were commissioned to design a system to display the chairs clearly to the public. Kossmann.dejong was a natural choice to design the exhibition as the studio also played an active part in the redesign of the building's library. The solution was to build a four-storey high wall of aluminium scaffolding where the top shelves can be reached via a staircase on wheels that is positioned alongside the racks.   The collection has been built up since the establishment of the architecture faculty in the 19th century, and consists of a large number of famous and less well-known chairs from around the world. Included in the collection are chairs by Dutch designers Gerrit Rietveld, Marcel Wanders and Chris Kabel.

Photography courtesy of TU Delft

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