Meet nendo

Meet nendo, the distinguished global design firm founded by Oki Sato in 2002, with offices in Tokyo and Milan. Nendo is known for its thoughtful, minimalist designs. This video teases a series called 50 manga chairs which playfully riffs on archetypes from Japanese manga comics. As you can see here, each chair has its own personality. Fifty real chairs, in stainless steel, made their exhibition debut at the Milan Furniture Fair in April 2016.

When Rachel Delphia, Carnegie Museum of Art’s Alan G. and Jane A. Lehman Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, considered acquiring a manga chair for our collection, she couldn’t choose just one. “They are great individually, but even better as a series,” she says. “It was an impossible choice.”

Then Delphia discovered the full set of 3D printed plastic models at 1/10 scale. “It was too wonderful to be true. We decided to acquire the models for the museum so that we could share the whole range with our visitors,” she says. “It’s an economical use of space, too: fifty real chairs would take up an entire room!”

Curious to know how big 1/10 scale is? Here’s Delphia holding the color calibration card for scale during our team’s photo shoot with these objects.