The story of how Cardiff, UK-based designer and manufacturer Dave Jones achieved the impressive confluence of hard lines and severe angles that is his faceted 3mm powder-coated steel Kyoto Seat features prominent mention of the word “guillotine”—probably a sign that it’s not for the squeamish. Inspired by the art of “Slipstream”—an album by the “broken beat” musical duo from Japan called Kyoto Jazz Massive—Jones intended an homage to the Origami-esque image on said album’s cover, an image whose abrupt and enigmatic angles are metaphorically relevant to the rhythmic disruptions therein.

Kyoto Seat. Designed by Dave Jones.

That’s a long way of saying that the piece is invested in a traditional form of Japanese art, albeit, an astoundingly new incarnation of such. Designers past have certainly paid tribute to the mysteries of Origami. The base of the hefty Cootie Catcher Table has a certain resonance to the ancient art, as does the whole of James Dieter’s Origami Chair, an admirable experiment with flatpack technology and flexible polycarbonate mesh. Like the real thing, Dieter’s piece was transformable, going from paper thin and flat to an upright, 3-dimensional, and structurally sound chair in mere minutes. Jones’ piece, to the contrary, is an homage of a different sort: its full steel construction eschews the ineffability of traditional origami in lieu of an impressive material permanence.

But back to the ever-intriguing “guillotine.” Pressed for an explanation of the manufacturing process, Jones informs that each of Kyoto’s separate planes (and I count 15, but the subtle trickery of geometry was never my strong suit) was cut using this archaic and ominous tool of the French Revolution: “a jig with the footprint shape then allowed me to hold the bottom half in place… I spot welded it in places then filled the gap between each plane with a weld line and joined them together in the same way.” The result is an innovative aesthetic that recalls epochs past while invoking auspicious portents for the future. A versatile piece of art-come-design that would fit right in among Tokyo’s burgeoning profusion of upscale tea cafes, as easily as within L.A.’s slew of cross-cultural coffee/yerba mate hangouts, the Kyoto Seat is bound to bend to the most rarified of sensibilities

via Coroflot