Alessandro Stabile's Beautiful Areo Chair for Kristalia

The iconic Thonet chair, designed in the 1850s, never really had a spiritual successor. Michael Thonet's mastery of both material (Beech) and production process (steam bending, then placing in cast iron molds to hold tight curves), yielded something both easy to manufacture and easy on the eyes. In the following century, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer made tubular-frame chairs out of steel. But while these were considered classics in their own right, the production technology at the time simply couldn't match Thonet's extreme bends. The 20th century chairs, though designed 60-plus years after Thonet's, seem primitive in comparison. Present-day, Italian industrial designer Alessandro Stabile has designed a tubular-frame chair that harnesses production mastery in the service of yielding a beautiful organic form. Here is his Areo chair: Behind Areo's apparent lightness lies a rigorous mechanical process. The tubular frame is shaped through CNC cold bending technology, capable of executing continuous curves with millimetre precision. After the robotic forming phase, every structural joint is manually welded to ensure maximum mechanical strength. The ergonomics of the chair are the result of hundreds of tests and refinements. Even the production scraps generated during development are fully recycled and reintroduced into the manufacturing cycle, reducing waste to zero. Technology, craftsmanship, and engineering working together to shape comfort. The newly-designed Areo is going into production by Italian furniture brand Kristalia.