Martino Gamper and the Chair
That Refuses to Be Finished

For a hundred days, one man walked past the same skips, the same curbs, the same piles of furniture other people had already given up on, and came home with a chair.

Not the same chair twice. By day 100, Martino Gamper hadn't built a hundred chairs, he'd asked one question a hundred ways: what if a broken chair isn't broken, just unfinished?

One day it was a spindle-backed dining chair grafted onto the legs of a 1970s office swivel. Another day, a nursing chair's arm ended up welded, conceptually if not literally, to the seat of something that had clearly once lived in a school hall. Nothing matched. Nothing was supposed to.

From Merano to Ron Arad's Studio

Gamper was born in 1971 in Merano, a small town in the South Tyrol region of northern Italy, and his path into design started with his hands rather than a sketchbook. He apprenticed with a furniture maker there before leaving for Vienna, where he studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts under Michelangelo Pistoletto, a formative detail, because Pistoletto himself built a career out of mirrors, reflection, and the idea that an artwork isn't complete until the world outside it is folded in.

From Vienna, Gamper moved to London and completed a Master's at the Royal College of Art in 2000, studying under Ron Arad, another designer with little patience for the idea that furniture should behave itself. Gamper stayed in London. He still lives and works there, and still teaches at the RCA, passing the same restlessness on to the next generation of students standing in front of a pile of material they don't yet know what to do with.

100 Chairs in 100 Days

The project that made Gamper's name started, by his own account, as something close to a diary. For a hundred consecutive days, he collected chairs and chair fragments that had been discarded, left on the street, handed over by friends, pulled from wherever people stop seeing a chair as a chair and start seeing it as something to get rid of, and combined them into one new hybrid seat per day.

He has described the resulting body of work as a kind of "3D drawing," a sketchbook made of wood and upholstery instead of pencil marks. It shows in the results: the pieces are often lopsided, mismatched, occasionally very funny, always structurally sound enough to actually sit in. Gamper wasn't interested in the design tradition that prizes harmony and symmetry above all else.

"There is no perfect chair." There is only the next one.

The full set was first shown in London in 2007, then at the Milan Triennale in 2009, and later at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in 2010. It became a book, 100 Chairs in 100 Days and its 100 Ways, designed by the studio Åbäke, and won the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year Furniture Award in 2008, a serious prize for a project that started with things other people had thrown away.

A Stool Built to Fund a Park

What happened to the leftovers is, in some ways, the more telling story.

When the 100 Chairs project wrapped, Gamper had off-cuts and scraps that didn't fit anywhere. Rather than binning them, he used them to design a simple, stackable, rotation-moulded stool, now known as the Arnold Circus Stool, named after a small bandstand and garden in Shoreditch, East London, built more than a century ago on the cleared rubble of what had been one of the city's worst slums.

By the mid-2000s, Arnold Circus had fallen into disrepair. A local charity, Friends of Arnold Circus, began working with artists and designers, Gamper among them, to raise money for its restoration. The stool he designed became the fundraising object itself: sold in limited runs and rotating colours, still funding the upkeep of that same small patch of London today, still used as actual seating at the circus picnics, brass band concerts, and film nights the garden now hosts.

It's a small object with an unusually specific job: it exists because a neighbourhood needed money to take care of a public space, and a designer had material left over from a project about not throwing things away. The two problems solved each other.

What Comes After the Chairs

Gamper's practice never really stopped being about reassembly. He's spent years pairing found furniture with the archives of design history's own icons, most notably a long-running series of pieces made in dialogue with the Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino, using pieces Mollino left unfinished or in fragments and completing them in Gamper's own hand. In 2025, two results of that collaboration, "Gamper Mollino Chair No. 20" and "Stool 7," entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In 2014, the Serpentine Gallery in London gave Gamper a major platform: he guest-curated "Design Is a State of Mind," a survey of design objects, from Ercol and Gio Ponti to Ettore Sottsass and, pointedly, IKEA, arranged across a landscape of shelving he designed for the show. The title could double as a mission statement for everything he'd made up to that point, and everything he's made since. In 2023, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to design, a formal way of saying that the chairs made from other people's discards had, over two decades, become part of the establishment they once quietly mocked.

Why This Matters Beyond the Chair

It would be easy to file Gamper under "clever design gimmick," a hundred chairs, a nice story, a museum acquisition. But the actual idea underneath the work is a plainer one, and it's the same idea ArtCycle was built around: that an object doesn't stop having value the moment someone else decides it's finished with it. A chair leg someone left on a Shoreditch curb isn't waste until it's treated as waste. Up until that point, it's just a chair leg waiting for the right pair of hands.

Gamper's hands happened to belong to someone with a Master's from the Royal College of Art and, eventually, an OBE. Most of the furniture sitting in Dutch garages and storage units right now will never meet a designer with that particular résumé. But the same basic transaction, someone with real skill looking at a discarded object and seeing what it could still become, is exactly what we try to make possible for anyone, not just the pieces lucky enough to end up on a gallery floor. It's the same instinct behind why local artists are the missing piece in the circular economy closer to home.

There is no perfect chair. There's just the next thing someone's willing to make of it.

This article was written by ArtCycle as an editorial feature based on publicly available information and research about Martino Gamper. More on his work at martinogamper.com