I put the photos of 4 chairs designed by Azumi for Next Maruni. The first photo shows the small chair(the photo with its plan-paper) commercialized in the first year of Next Maruni Project. The next photo shows the arm-chair he worked on last year. When designing this one, he took up a different design principle for it. Because of the arms added, the design of the initial small chair was affected. The frames of the chair are made straight.( This work wasn’t introduced in last year’s Salone due to some mistake of Maruni Woodwork. ) The next photo shows this year’s work, a lounge-chair. This work, though without arms, is not back to the design of the original wood chair, but simply the arms have been removed from last year’s arm-chair and then made bigger in its size. Another small chair ( the one without arms seen from the front ) is the one he designed after he began to insist the section of the frames of the first small chair be straight to be consistent with the arm-chair and the lounge chair. He didn’t like the original design of the first small chair has triangular-shaped frames.

Don’t take me wrong. I’m not criticizing his works as such an attitude of Mr.Azumi as a designer well indicates his principle to totally coordinate his design works thinking of what he should do at particular moments. As a result, the first original wood chair had to be ousted from the series and three other chairs, the new small chair, the arm-chair and the lounge-chair came to enjoy the consistency among them.

There is another secret in Azumi’s chairs that tends to be overlooked by many. Since he began to work on an arm-chair, as the last photo shows, the side frames of right and left have been a little tilted toward each other. It’s the big difference from the design of the original small chair with triangular-shaped frame section. The little tilt of the frames is needed for the designs with square frame section lines, which was not needed for the original design with triangular frame section lines. The completed expression of the first work with triangular frame section lines is lost when he adopted the square frame section lines. By giving the little tilt to it, he must have felt the beauty of the original design well maintained.

For an additional story, a certain wood furniture company whose project Azumi is also planning to participate in has introduced small chairs in a similar project to Next Maruni. Azumi’s participation is no problem but among the works, there is one named “a small chair having rabbit’s ears”. Its designer’s name is not mentioned here but its concept is very similar to that of SANAA(An Organization managed by Kazuyo Imojima). The concept of the project itself is similar to that of Next Maruni Project. Maruni Woodwork is expressing its uncomfortable feeling about this.