Brace Chair by Studio Goons, Scandinavian Birch Plywood

Archive Collection · Chairs

Brace Chair

Name: Brace Chair
Brand: Studio Goons

The Brace Chair is a dining chair by Studio Goons built on an architectural bracing principle, first shown in our solo exhibition Evolving Forms at St Vincents gallery in Antwerp.

The name is technical. A brace is the diagonal member that resists lateral movement in a frame. A shear wall does the same job. That component is the entire design.

Working from the shear wall gave us a chair built like a small piece of construction. The side planes carry the load, the seat spans between them, and the back extends down as the brace. There are no applied stretchers or brackets anywhere on the piece. What holds the chair up is what you see.

Reducing a chair to its structural grammar is harder than adding to it. Every element that remains has to earn its place twice, once as structure and once as form. Anything that could be removed was removed.

The Brace Chair became a family rather than a single object. The Brace Chair A returns it with armrests, the Brace Chair AC adds cushions in pure Italian wool, the Brace Bench carries the logic along a horizontal, and the Brace Stool reduces it to its smallest member. The principle holds at every scale, which is the test we set for it.

Studio Goons is a Paris-based collectible furniture and design atelier founded in 2020 by architect Paul Trussler and designer Mia Kim. Paul spent five years with Frank Gehry in Los Angeles working on museums and cultural buildings, and five with Atelier Tsuyoshi Tane Architects in Paris. That structural and design training directly influenced this piece.

Every work is designed, prototyped and hand-built by us in Paris, signed and numbered.

Inquiries can be made through St. Vincents