Magazine
A Plant-Based Chair, Three Years in the Making
Humberto Campana wanted to create furniture from a Brazilian “golden grass.” But first, he would have to wait for the harvest.
“Everyone Who Made This Happen” takes a look at the outsize teams of artists and creative types it often takes to produce a single work.
Number of people involved: 35.
Time from conception to completion: Three years.
While on a 2014 trip to Jalapão, a region in the central Brazilian state of Tocantins that’s known for its unlikely combination of springs and sand dunes, the furniture designer Humberto Campana, 71, purchased about 30 disks wound from the golden-hued stems of capim dourado, a grasslike plant native to the area. The disks, which are sometimes used as potholders, sat in his São Paulo studio for five years until he wondered whether they could be joined to make a kind of tapestry that could in turn become a chair. That chair ended up with a bowl-like seat fashioned from a lattice of double-sided circles — sheepskin cutouts in the front and capim dourado disks in the back — though arriving at the finished prototype took another nine months of tinkering.