Lucas Maassen (1975 Eindhoven) is a 2003 graduate of the Design Academy Eindhoven (nl). After his graduation, he worked for Droog Design, Unilever, Philips, the Grand Palais Paris as well as the Dutch Architecture Institute (NAI). He exhibited worldwide in (MoMA) New York, (Grand Palais) Paris, Miami, Cologne, Milano, Torino, Eindhoven and Rotterdam. Lucas Maassen lectures design at the ICT & Media Design department of the Fontys University of Applied Sciences.
At what point does furniture exist? Lucas Maassen started exploring this border in 2002 by listing dollhouse chairs for sale on Ebay without mentioning there scale or true nature. They became real furniture in the mind of potential buyers who placed bids on the items. Removing the scale of the items true photography was the first step in detaching concept from form. Scale became an important subject in his 2003 graduation work "sitting chairs", a tableau vivant featuring an animistic family of chairs. Small changes on the convention of chairs have granted them life, mainly the removal of rear legs and sometimes the addition of feet, arms and hands. Some clearly function as furniture, others look like toys judging by there scale and material. But where is the line between chair and toy? Did toys turn into furniture or did furniture turn into toys? Following the example of furniture companies who offer free 3d models of there furniture for use in architectural visualizations, Lucas made one of his designs titled 3D-MC1 available as a free download too. Differing in that it had no analogue counterpart and therefore could deny rules like gravity and comfort that apply to real world furniture. In his film "Alternate reality chair" he could not resist actually building a 3D-MC1 chair to see what could happen. In his latest project "Nano chair" he dives deeper in the subject of scale, any deeper would technologically be impossible. In collaboration with Phillips research, a tiny sitting chair grew layer by layer in a glass petri dish. invisible to the human eye, only witnessed by an atomic force microscope. What's the limit of what we define as an object?
React!