The art of the ordinary: Morrison & Fukasawa

In 2006 Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa staged an exhibition and wrote a small book together called Super Normal. Its argument was quiet but pointed: the best objects are usually not the loud, novel ones, but the ones so resolved and familiar that we stop noticing them at all.

It was a deliberate provocation aimed at a design culture addicted to novelty — a case that the highest achievement might be to make something that looks like it was always there.

The Air-Chair as manifesto

Morrison's Air-Chair is that manifesto in plastic. It was the first single-piece chair designed to be made with air-moulding — gas blown into the mould to form hollow structural tubes — a technique Magis's Alberto Perazza first showed him as car-industry tubing, as Dezeen recounts. The result looks like a chair you have always known. That is the achievement, not the accident.

The most radical thing a chair can do is look like it has always existed.

The novelty, in other words, is hidden inside. The manufacturing is genuinely new; the appearance is deliberately ordinary — the exact inversion of design that innovates in looks and repeats in method.

Déjà-vu, by name

Fukasawa's Déjà-vu family — chair, stool, mirror — is named for precisely that feeling. Even his Cu-Clock, a cuckoo clock reduced to a clean ABS house with a pop-out bird, takes a folkloric object and files it down to the version already in your head. Nothing is invented; everything is refined.

That refinement is harder than invention. Removing a design's quirks without removing its character is the whole discipline, and the reward is an object that never tires you.

The highest compliment

Buy one of these and within a month you won't remember it being new. For Super Normal design, that is the highest compliment there is.

It is also, quietly, a sustainability argument: the object you never grow bored of is the object you never replace.