Silla Guarda 'Inside-Out' collection  

I would love to see or read a...
I would love to see or read an explanation for this kind of "creativity". Apart from a very short "eureka" moment generated by discovering that one chair could hide another one, I can not see why someone would go through such an effort (this is a major technical challenge) for this end result. It reminds me of the now famous picture of the two escalators leading up to a Japanese physical training facility. Are we really living in a world in which physical exercise is encouraged as long as it is not part of your job and creativity as long as it does not serve any particular purpose?...or should I read this as a statement about the hidden identity of objects and about the fact that inside the contemporary plastic version of the chair architype there is a tradition of "wooden" ancestors...or should I sit down and read Johannes Itten's mystifications...

"Too clever
by half" is an expression I've heard. There's a table and a chair. Both the Corian (solid surface material) and the redwood (?) do indeed represent technical challenges. Well, so did Fabergé's eggs, I suppose. But it does all seem unnecessary, doesn't it.
I confess to having been seduced by the "cleverness" of an idea, while a student. (These things usually issue from the young idealist, in my experience.) I made the older of these two pairs of salad servers while in school, and subsequently gave them to my oldest friend, a vegetarian who likes to make hearty meals. I neglected to instruct her in the maintenance of woodenware: dry promptly ! Nor did I oil them. I imagine she may have occasionally soaked them; her husband tried repairs with some sort of white adhesive. Major portions are missing, as you can see. The wood is maple. The absorption of oils and other stuffs has left interesting patterns.
Ten years ago I revived the design, and made three or four pairs in cherry. The ones I gave to friends (beginning with Margaret, who sent me the 35-year-old ones on the promise that I'd fix or replace them !) I made sure to coat well with mineral oil. The new pair shown here has yet to receive its final sanding and finish.
The design is clearly a bad one for any wood save the densest ironwoods (?) because of the short grain that is present in the scooped portion (see photo of broken one). The new ones are somewhat thicker here than were the originals -- but only time will tell how they "weather."
But, to address the original subject, is the idea of a pair of identically-shaped "hands" cupped together for serving food a viable one -- or just a "too clever" student exercise ?

SDR
Not "clever" at all. A great solution to a problem... getting a good portion, picking up the last bits in a large salad bowl. Like so much of the design I love they look timeless. Could have been created in 1959 or yesterday.
I have only two questions. Why did you use cherry as opposed to teak or other short-grained hardwood that loves oil and will tolerate water and other harsh treatment, and when will they be widely available so I can get a set?
The chairs are cute, but don't do anything for me. To me, they appear as another "one-liner". They are, perhaps, too clever.

they seem a waste of...
they seem a waste of material to me..

.
I agree. I like the salad servers too SDR, I made something with short grain weakness a while ago and as a test just bashed it against the edge of a table at its weakest point until I was blue in the face and had no trouble, though funnily enough it was something called 'red ironbark'. Perhaps they are not as weak as you think, try it, a nice bit of testing to destruction is kinda fun.
Lately I've taken to hanging around antique shops (God forbid I ever grow a moustache, wear a fedora and buy a schnauzer) and its great, some of the stuff is so innovative and in such an unassuming way, it doesn't slap you in the face and say 'look at me' and the staff actually have real knoweldge not like these aesthetic ice princesses that work in the mod stores who when you you ask them a question...'um I think its a kind of metal" Duh.
Sorry for the whinge! The chairs are of course, like the Zanotta sofa, tiresome. Paging through contemporary design mags is just an exercise in repetition and boredom, does anyone else find this? I opened up a 10 year old Wallpaper magazine the other night and felt like nothing has gone anywhere, fast.

My personal
feeling is that we (mankind) used up a thousand years' worth of aesthetic material in the last century or so (in a way that parallels our exhausting of the planet's resources) and that, for the time being, there's nowhere left to go. This is not necessarily the same thing as "the end of civilization as we know it" -- though it wouldn't surprise me a bit to see Earth take her revenge any time now, either.
Teak is a great idea. I don't know that I'd have thought of it 35 years ago, but that gives me no excuse for the more recent reissue. . .! Actually, they should properly be made of "resin" -- or maybe ceramic ? Koen ?

I'm not feeling quite that de...
I'm not feeling quite that defeated, people like David Trubridge, Anish Kapoor and Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster are doing some very good work, though a bit hit and miss they are worth looking at.
Its such a shame post modernism had a sneering sort of attitude, like the past was just a mine for a series of badly proportioned jokes. It could have been so much more.
I keep reminding myself that what we see of design in this city of images that is advertising, retail and the internet is the tip of the iceberg and there is a lot of great 'unconscious' work in the built environment. My parents neighbour is an older lady and has done a lot of work on her own place, its utterly charming. Her verandah is an enclosed room with vertical slats running about 3 metres high and is lovely and cool in summer and she can leave the house open and just lock the verandah door. Her old pigsty is covered in a beautiful flowering vine, when I was digging the foundations for my new workshop I kept finding bits of old glass and ceramic, she came and told me that under her fernhouse is an old well dug by WW2 soldiers who used where I'm typing now as a training camp, they dumped all their refuse in the well and filled it in. My parents and her basically share a garden (and the fruits of it) featuring a lot of local sandstone, best sandstone in the world!
There is room for optimism, it just doesn't come from the pages of magazines anymore, for me anyway.

Perhaps there's
a clue for me, in your last remark: perhaps the difference now is that there's so much more media, which needs content, so that we see a great deal more creative work -- both the great and the pedestrian ? Rather than just the cream of the crop -- the names you cite, for instance -- we see every permutation and derivation imaginable ?

yeah if its all mutual...
yeah if its all mutual action and reaction ad infinitum (and everyone can see it all the time) its a leveller, which I don't think is allways a good thing.
I think its why some people prefer to be isolated, I know I do. When I moved from the inner urban area of a capital city I was astounded how much of a greenhouse I'd been living in, it was suppsoedly all about diversity but it was stupifylingy homogenous in retrospect.
Unintentional hijack sorry, back to the original chairs, theres usually something good to be said and I like Corian (and am sure the Eames would have used it in preferance to formica over ply) and I like the veneer but wonder about the weight,the $$$$ and the ease of aligning the two to insert them. Perhaps an alteration in the profile of the corian chair could have allowed the insertion of a side table instead. Great for places like hotel lobbies or cafes where flexibility is required and cleaners have to vacuum the area. But the point of stacking is surely to be able to do it in multiples of more than two? As was said its a big technical challenge and a similar result could have been achieved much more cheaply.
hahaha, Koens comment reminds me of a story a friend told me once when she was living in a horrible pretentious city on the coast, in the morning these young woman would arrive at the beach by taxi in order to jog and parade along the sand and hop back in the taxi for the trip home.

chairs, spoons n beaches
I also like SDR's spoons. Add me to the wish list.
In wood are really great. Re-made it in another material...
Resin could be OK, the translucent resin turns yellowish soon, but in colours...
What about in Aluminium Foundry (on earth mold)
As is an organic shape would be interesting.
Heath,hhah i'd like to know where is that beach, I've learned it for next summer here. 🙂

Chairs
I respect the criticism some of you have voiced, but I'm mostly considering the practicality of these chairs as well as their relative beauty compared to metal folding chairs. We have eight chairs around my office's conference table, and we often have meetings with more people. We end up pulling chairs from offices, and sometimes pulling out the loud, uncomfortable metal folding chairs. These would be a nice alternative.
Ideally we should have a bigger table and more chairs, but for now I'd rather buy these, all else being equal.

Equal
Actually... All else wouldn't be equal. In all likelihood these will be expensive, and inexpensive stacking chairs would make more sense. I like the attempt to solve a space problem.

have you considered the 40-4 ...
have you considered the 40-4 chairs?
Well made, relatively cheap, good resale value and if you purchase a few you might be able to replace other seating at the same time.

one not-so-minor design flaw
If for no other reason, those chairs are poorly designed because you can't tuck your feet under the seat as you rise. You will have to pitch forward more to get your weight over your feet, and this will be awkward, especially if you're holding a drink or plate, or if you're just old and creaky.
I hate chairs like that.
The 40/4, on the other hand--very compactly stackable and pretty comfortable unless you are playing the French horn on one. (The music conservatory that I attended used them on the concert stage and all of us horn players would have to go scrounge for the few conventional chairs that were in the hall, which sometimes resulted in arguments if there weren't enough to be had. It's been 30 years but I still think of that every time I see those chairs.)