In 2011, the Endless chair came to life as Dirk van der Kooij’s hard-fought graduation project. In a worldwide first, he had reconfigured a pneumatic robot arm to extrude furniture from recycled plastic. The first series consisted of gently tinted plastic threads, built up shakily to form 3D tapestries. A mal-aligned motor imparted a scalloped pattern, though was also responsible for the unlikely tacitly of the technique. Whilst our current robots extrude with a steady hand, the scalloping has been maintained intentionally. Now printed from transparent plastic, the gentle undulations heighten light refraction and invite comparisons to cut crystal. In 2011, the endless chair won acclaim in the form of the Dutch Design Award. It sits happily in the MoMA and Stedelijk Museum.

In 2009, Dirk van der Kooij founded this studio in the basement of the Design Academy, Eindhoven. His guiding question was seemingly simple: could plastic be an honest, durable material? Six pizza ovens welded together proved that yes, it could. The resulting Elephant Skin series saw recycled plastic wrinkle and contract as it cooled outside of a mould, conjuring a rich, living tactility. The ultimate imitator had finally found an identity of its own.
Select pieces have joined the permanent collections of the Stedelijk museum, MoMA New York, MoMA San Francisco, Vitra Design Museum, Design Museum London, and the National Museum in Oslo.