Fabian Harb is the co-founder of Dinamo and an avid chair collector — a fact we uncovered during our collaboration with Dinamo when developing AAVVGG Monument Grotesk.
We asked Fabian to walk us through some of his favourites.
Fabian Harb — I rarely sit on the same chair for more than a week. I think I have maybe 40 or 50 of them at the moment. My home doesn’t have a lot of space, so I keep most of the chairs at my studio in Porto where we have more chairs than we do people (I’d say it’s a ratio of 4:1). So I might have a few too many of them right now…
This is the chair that I sit on the most. It’s Enzo Mari’s “Box” chair from the 1970s. The idea was that when you bought it, it would come folded together as a box in a plastic bag. Everything can be unscrewed and put together again.
This chair is by the Finnish designer Yrjö Kukkapuro. Years ago, when Dinamo was teaching at the art academy in Tallinn for a month, we took a trip to Helsinki and I saw this Kukkapuro chair in a second hand shop. And then a few years ago, I actually visited the designer in his studio in Helsinki.
When you unscrew the parts of this chair by Susi and Ueli Berger, each of its elements makes up the letters for the word “stuhl.” That’s “chair” in German. I got this one from the carpenter who used to produce furniture for the couple, and he still had some pieces left. I was really lucky!
Actually, this is the chair I use the most right now. It’s a collapsible pram called the Yoyo. We got it before a recent trip because you can fold it down into one piece, which is amazing when you travel. Especially when you’re alone with the pram.
This last chair is the most dear to me. It’s the 3300 Dietiker chair by Bruno Rey, the most produced chair in Switzerland, and we created a Dinamo edition of it together with Maximage a few years ago. You find the standard version in every hospital, town hall, or public library in Switzerland.
