Chair sculptures cannot be planned, only proposed as a challenge. For any designer focusing on meticulous work through the late night into early morning, distractions and mental breaks are necessary. The only difference between designers and everyone else is that we have a studio to create our own temporary playgrounds.

Chair Sculpture 

As the digital realm continues to take over the metaphysical and now even the physical world, we like to joke; architecture is endangered. The spaces in which we are inhabiting are rapidly being overtaken by digital media. Advertising, communication, distractions and lies travel with us and greet us at our every destination. We imagine a not so distant future, where rooms are clad with screens on all surfaces, where physical architecture will have been withered to the lonely chair. 

It is with this conceptual understanding, So & So Studio has created their mobile office. With left-over legs picked up in Italy and Eames replica seats found in a dumpster in Berlin, So & So met to build their first piece of furniture; the last piece of architecture. 

The mobile office project is an exercise in freedom, with flexibility that results in scenery changes and choices. Yet it can also be seen as an analog demonstration of the future of simulation in everyday life. 

We choose to celebrate the chair as a tool for activation and attraction. In a digital world these chairs have proved to be a tool for engagement. There is a visual curiosity that engages the public as well as a physical one, which often prompts questions.

Mobile Office

Thinking through collaged media, we begin each project with completely unfiltered artistic intuition.

Casa Collage

We often find ourselves looking for outlets to express our passion for form and space building. the “Inflation Station” case study series has filled our rapid space building void.



Inflation Station

At this year’s European Architecture Students Assembly [EASA], So & So Studio has hosted a workshop, entitled re:MAP. The workshop challenged its 25 participants to wander / identify / document / connect / activate “overlooked and underutilized” spaces, within the city of Rijeka, Croatia. The result has blanketed the city with more than 45 spatial “nodes”. These “nodes” were created in an effort to graphically communicate with the citizens and visitors of Rijeka regarding the hidden potential of programmatic function, behavioural activity and spatial usages of public space which have been declared overlooked by the workshop’s participants.

During their first week-long exploration and analysis of the city, participants of So & So Studio’s re:MAP workshop were partitioned into four groups. Zoned by district, functional type and intervention color,  they were then given the opportunity to develop their own collective, layered map using analog drawing and collaging techniques as part of their larger intervention studies. In the second part of their 14-day-workshop, using only paint, the participants were challenged to create a dialog with residents of the city and activate the potential of their documented spaces by collaging their ideas on to the city of Rijeka.

re:MAP is an urban experiment with an end goal of sparking curiosity and revealing new ways in which the citizens of Rijeka view and interact with their own public spaces.

Participants: Alessandra Mencancini, Anna Shishkina, Anna Eglite Sørensen, Cody Swanson, Dániel Győrfi, David Henderson, Egil Kahlbom, Elisabeth Sandel, Elena Demarco, Emma Anzolin, Gintare Petkeviciute, Giorgi Chinchaladze, Ivan Plamenov, Maria Savova, Orest Yaremchuk, Ralitsa Kirilova, Sophie Reiffenstuhl, Szimonetta Bódi, Tomiris Kupzhassarova, Úlfur Bragi Einarsson, Vlad Afanasiev, Yana Buchatska

Photos by: So & So Studio, Orest Yaremchuk, Dániel Győrfi, Alexandra Kononchenko

reMAP Rijeka

In their current body of work, Ripped Off, So & So explores the excavation and reduction of space using residual materials: found and ripped off the streets of Berlin, Germany.

Jorge Luis Borges, in 1985, claims: “Space, according to the idealists, does not exist in and of itself: it is a mental phenomenon, like pain, fear, and vision, and being part of consciousness, it may in no way be said that consciousness is situated in space.”

This proposal explores the studios use of collage as an intuitive exploration to each project, whether the result is built architectural space, eventually realized, or just the visualization of perceived space. Within the recording of time, space, as it is recognized in consciousness, is the artifact and evidence of moments which exist in the present. As architects, it is our responsibility to realize space in every facet of the word. 

Through collage, So & So continuously utilizes the instantaneous results of perceived space. It is within this result where the So & So consciousness of space becomes the viewer’s perceived time. Posters from the past are taken from the streets to feed an intuitive spatial creation and understanding of the architectural future. The viewer will experience a current reality, that is a present state of a layered past. A past that was once advertising for the future, but now draws the viewer into a new spatial dimension of a hopeful future.

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