Silver Furniture · 2026
Soo No. 2 Chair
by Sangin Park
- Silver A' Design Award 2026 in Furniture
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 24,498
- Verification code 0248B99F2C · Verify this award
Colors
About Soo No. 2 Chair
Soo No. 2 is a wooden chair designed for everyday seating. In most chairs the rear legs continue upward to support the backrest. In Soo No. 2 the rear legs and the backrest supports are separated into independent elements. The separation improves structural stability and creates a clear visual balance. The legs are cylindrical and the seat is woven with Danish cord. All structural joints use mortise and tenon joinery, and through joints form small diamond-shaped details along the sides of the frame. The armrests and backrest supports are fixed with discreet brass pins.
About the Silver A' Design Award
Soo No. 2 Chair is a Silver A' Design Award winner, an extraordinarily prestigious recognition granted to top-of-the-line, gorgeous, and impressive designs. Silver winners are tremendously brilliant and exceedingly creative works that illustrate the outstanding expertise, talent, and acuity of their designers. Soo No. 2 Chair is expected to be a wonderful, showpiece work that is remarkably professional and profoundly innovative. This Silver A' Design Award-winning design is a highly notable, admired invention that benefits and advances the boundaries of art, science, design, and technology. Soo No. 2 Chair is a vastly envied creation that evokes desires, introduces positive feelings, and sparks amazement and wonderment.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- The most distinctive feature of this chair is the design of its rear legs. While conventional chairs extend the rear legs upward to support the backrest as two vertical columns, this approach was reconsidered in terms of structural stability. By separating the rear legs from the backrest support as independent elements, the design achieves both enhanced structural integrity and a clear sense of visual balance.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- Width 580mm x Depth 640mm x Height 770mm
- Tags
- chair, chair design, woodworking
- Production Technology
- In realizing this chair, certain elements were intentionally kept traditional, including the cylindrical legs and a seat woven with Danish cord. Special attention was required where the squared frame members meet the round legs. All Structural joints are crafted using mortise and tenon joinery, with through mortise and tenon joints forming subtle diamond-shaped details along the frame sides. The armrests and back rest supports are fixed with discreet brass pins, preserving the clarity and simplicity of the overall shape.
- Design Challenge
- Design is shaped by the social and cultural context in which it is produced. Working within the Korean cultural context, where floor-based living has historically shaped furniture traditions, forms such as chests and low tables developed more clearly than chairs. This absence can create uncertainty for contemporary woodworkers, who often reference traditional architecture when designing chairs. This project began by questioning whether traditional forms were created primarily for aesthetic expression or as practical responses to life and the human body. Rather than replicating inherited forms, the focus shifted toward designing a chair that responds to bodily experience and everyday use.
- Research
- Type of Research :
Practice-based design research.
Research Objective :
To explore how visual stability and comfort interact in chair design.
Methodology :
Full-scale making and iterative adjustment of structure and angles.
Data Collection and Research Tools Used :
Physical prototypes, sitting tests, and dimensional comparison.
Participants or Experiments :
Separating rear legs from backrest support to resolve structural conflict.
Results :
Greater formal freedom and improved balance.
Insights :
Because rear legs and backrest supports perform different roles and absorb forces differently when seated, separating them—beyond concerns of material efficiency—allows chair design to become more flexible and expressive.
Impacts :
The study contributes to furniture design by demonstrating how structural separation can expand formal possibilities while improving everyday seating comfort. - Inspiration
- The chair was inspired by 12 months of building 12 different chairs, during which the relationship between the rear legs and the backrest support became a recurring concern. In conventional designs, rear leg placement that improves stability often compromises posture, while configurations that support proper seating increase the risk of tipping, with angled legs further distorting the overall form. These tensions led to the decision to separate the two functions into distinct structural elements
- Project Duration
- This chair is the final outcome of a personal project involving the creation of 12 different chairs over a 12 month period. The making of this chair itself, including the final wax finish, took approximately twenty days. However, the process of determining the appropriate shapes and compositions for each part took place almost a year. The chair was crafted in December 2025 in Go-yang City, on the outskirts of Seoul, South Korea.
- Operation Flow
- A chair is the piece of furniture that comes into closest contact with the human body. Beyond visual appeal, it must satisfy the highly subjective requirement of comfort. As the position and proportion of each element strongly shape the user’s experience, several dimensions were referenced from a classic chair by Hans J. Wegner, known for its balanced and familiar comfort. Interestingly, adopting only selected measurements leads to a distinctly new experience, revealing the unique and subtle nature of how a chair interacts with the human body.
