The Chair Designed to Collapse When You Sit On It

“It just feels like exploration. It feels like reaching towards something that doesn’t exist yet.”

A dream and a toilet paper roll

Nude Modular started with a dream. Billy Hietanen dreamt about a piece of furniture, a butterfly stool, and when he woke up he made it straight away, prototyping it out of a toilet paper roll.

That was the beginning, and it never really stopped. “Ever since then, I never stopped having ideas,” he told me. “It was like one idea created another idea, and it just felt like the universe was pulling me towards this and conspiring to help me get started.”

He talks about it as something he was meant to be doing. “It just felt like that’s what I was supposed to be doing at the moment.”

Reaching for what isn’t there

Billy describes his work as exploration. Some of the pieces are deliberately a bit absurd, and he knows it. He brought up the magnet chair as an example. “It’s a bit silly,” he said. “But it’s reaching, like, well, what happens if we could just put something somewhere? And then, you know, in future we might have technologies where we could do something different.”

Furniture, for him, is a way of asking that kind of question.

“It’s not like just one good idea. It’s like these two or three ideas seem to link up, and then it all works together.”

Aeroplane wings

Aeroplane wings are put together with what look like pop rivets, and Billy borrowed that for one of his pieces. “Nice sheet of aluminium, pop riveted, to get that sort of aeroplane wing look.”

Ideas tend to arrive like that for him, from small fragments. “I’ll just see a tiny bit of a propeller wing, and then I’m like, oh, I could do that. Or someone will say something and I’m like, oh, I could do this.” A design is rarely one idea on its own. It is two or three that click together, and once they do, there is no backing out. “You’re like, okay, all right. Now I have to do it.”

Up, down, left, right

Underneath the fragments is something bigger. Billy has a way of seeing the world that he uses as a method. “The way that I see the universe, and the universe’s formula, is up, down, left, right, positive, negative, and everything built from these opposites,” he said. “I just use that formula to create things.”

The big inspiration, he said, is the biggest question of all. “What is this? Where are we? What are we doing?”

Why chairs

Billy has ideas for a lot more than furniture. “I have so many ideas for so many things,” he said. “But at the moment, furniture is what I can actually make.”

Funnily enough, chairs are not his favourite thing. “I don’t particularly like chairs that much.” He experiments with them anyway, because a chair offers something an object on a shelf can’t. “You can look at it, but then you can also sit in it and feel what it feels like.”

“That’s exactly what I wanted.”

A swing and a miss

Some of the work is still rough when he first puts it together. Mocking one piece up against the ply, he liked what he saw. “I kind of like the look of it like that. Looks like space junk or something.” Then came the sit test. “Oh man, that’s actually pretty comfy.”

Not every first impression is a good one, though. When he first sat on one piece and saw the indentations it left, his first reaction was disappointment. “I was like, ah, that was a swing and a miss,” he said.

Then he looked at it again, this time through the lens of his phone, with the light hitting it a certain way, and it changed. “I was like, that’s exactly what I wanted.”