Pole Apart: Oskar Zięta

Making furniture by welding together sheets of steel and blowing them up sounds like an unlikely production process. Then again, it is also the reason Oskar Zięta is one of most celebrated, and certainly one of the most idiosyncratic, Polish designers working today.

Born in 1976 in Łódź, Zięta studied architecture in Szczecin before becoming a researcher at the department of Computer Aided Architectural Design at ETH Zürich in 2003. The collaborative, process-oriented nature of the institution influenced him significantly and he quickly developed a novel method of creating objects from steel, called "free inner pressure forming". Realising the technique's potential, Zięta created his first stool, Plopp, in 2007.

Plopp's appeal – whimsical, sturdy, mass-produced and each one uniquely undulating – was universal. Over time, it found its way into the permanent collections of Paris’s Centre Pompidou, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, and the Zurich Design Museum. In 2006, Zięta opened his own factory at home in Poland, and began producing chairs, hooks, trestles, mirrors and ladders using the same process. To much acclaim, in 2014 he was asked to create a temporary installation in the courtyard of London's Victoria and Albert Museum, made up of shallow, overlapping arches, created using the designer's signature method.

Despite having found success, Zięta is still innovating. His latest forays into experimental products include the 2013 3+, a collection of furniture constructed from perforated aluminium plates, and Pakiet, a flatpack line with a twist launched in 2016, in which disparate plywood elements are clipped together using metal brackets. Both show the designer's ingenuity in working with different materials, and his ability to surprise and delight in equal measure.

© Architonic