Hammered Stool

Hammered Stool is a minimalist stool created by Amsterdam-based studio Gerlach & Heilig. The stool begins its life as a flat sheet of laser-cut steel, a humble industrial material that speaks to our contemporary moment’s embrace of raw, unadorned surfaces. Yet what follows is a meditation on the ancient craft of metal forming, reimagined for materials that traditionally resist the hammer’s persuasion. Where blacksmiths of centuries past coaxed copper and bronze into shape through heat and rhythmic blows, Gerlach & Heilig have developed a technique that brings even stainless steel into dialogue with hand and tool.

“Each fold becomes a structural gesture,” the designers observe, and indeed, watching their process reveals something akin to industrial origami. The compressed-air hammer moves in measured, linear sequences across the steel’s surface, each impact calculated yet allowing for the material’s own voice in the conversation. This is not the violent domination of metal we might expect, but a patient negotiation between maker and material, where slight irregularities and subtle shifts in angle become not flaws to be corrected, but evidence of a living process.

The resulting stool carries within its form the entire history of its making. Unlike mass production’s erasure of process, every hammer strike remains visible, creating a topography of making that connects us directly to the hand that shaped it. This transparency of technique places the work within a broader movement in contemporary design that values process as much as product, authenticity as much as perfection.

Within the larger Hammered Scapes series, which explores more expressive and painterly applications of this technique, the stool represents a distillation – craft reduced to its essential conversation between material resistance and human persistence. It stands as testament to what designer and theorist Victor Papanek called “the function complex” – the idea that truly successful design operates simultaneously on practical, aesthetic, and symbolic levels.

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