The design of Richard Hutten is as innovative as it is full of variations and has made the co-founder of the famous design collective Droog one of the most influential and well-known creators of the Netherlands.

Besides the development of unconventional furniture he works also on industrial design and on interior and exhibition projects for several museums. He describes his designs as humorous, friendly and surprising and he is convinced that clever ideas can be realised with simple means.

For example his early `Table-Chair´consists of two parts - a square stool and an u-shaped arm and back rest whereby the latter could be used as a table, too. In recent years he has dealt with the accummulation of similar forms and with the layering of similar materials to create a new range of furniture.

His `Cloud Chair´is assembled of numreous segments of spheres made of polished nickel-plated aluminium castings. This cluster of bubbles has an sci-fi aura and reminds the viewer of a complex trigonometry. For his `Muybridge Chair´, named after one of the early pioneers of motion picture, he made a sequence of 53

photographs of himself capturing the movement of standing up from a sitting position. After having been scaled, laser-cut from fibreboard and put together in chronological order they shape the chair with Hutten´s legs forming the seat and his chest forming the back rest.

But the most exemplary layering Hutten achieves by far in his series of `Book Chairs´and `Book Tables´: They are made from layers of books with each book itself being a layer of pages. Hutten simply stackes up loads of many-coloured hardcover books in the shape of chairs and tables, then invisibly fixes these sculptural objects and finally coats them with resin.

As simple as this technique may seem at first sight it lends a much more philosophical effect to these objects: these chairs become `reading´-armchairs and these tables become `writing´-tables.