GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Architect Daniel Boddam turns to furniture design and makes a monumental entry
Boddam has created pieces of permanence that slip “quietly” into his own architecture
After reaching the peak of fame and influence, most great architects turn their attention to furniture. Its creation tells of the ‘total’ designer — one who can handle the macro and the micro of a building with a clear continuity. From Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry, they’ve all had a go but, typically, only after a maturity and mastery of architecture has been attained (50 years and beyond). This makes the recent design achievements of architect Daniel Boddam positively precocious. At only 36, this Sydney-based practitioner has released a range of furniture under the grandiose title of the Monument Collection. Yes, he does a good line in luxury housing, but after just a few years in his own practice, isn’t it a tad premature to be tackling furniture? Boddam laughs, blaming his DNA for the compulsion to design everything. “Both my parents are architects, so I’ve been at it a long time,” he says, explaining that his Venezuelan mother met his Australian father in London in the 1960s, resulting in a marriage, a multi-disciplinary Sydney practice and a mini-apprentice in Boddam. “I remember growing up in this beautiful little cottage out in the bush — totally utopian in concept — before moving to Mosman Bay, where the mood was part-Mayan, part-Frank Lloyd Wright. Home was always natural materials and the icons of furniture design. [Josef] Hoffmann, Le Corbusier and Wright — they could all translate the beauty of their structures into a comfortable seat.” Boddam made it his mission to emulate their holism, creating pieces of permanence that would slip “quietly” into his own architecture. And without meaning to ascribe major significance to his work, Boddam says the Monument Collection was named after big-impact buildings encountered during travels. “I remember going to Rome for the first time and being amazed by the way classic architecture distinguished itself from the ground plane on a simple podium,” he says, cross-referencing his ‘M’ coffee table in American oak to the Pantheon, that dome-capped triumph of engineering. His allusions to this first millennium temple are subtly worked into his coffee-table’s form — steps cut into one corner and an oculus scooped out of its surface. They allow for the third millennium propensity to personalise with props. But Boddam nods to a very different set of ancients in his ‘M’ dining table, the pyramidal oak base of which abstracts El Castillo, the Mayan temple ruin of Chichén Itzá on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. And yet its massing and luxe materiality — a circular slab of marble or oak floating on an aged-metal mid-section — speaks of the same formal concerns. Interestingly, both the Pantheon and El Castillo are religious sites, built with advanced skills by civilisations that came to an abrupt end. Boddam, who is planning to grow the range, doesn’t deem this an omen. “These are buildings of enduring relevance and appeal because of their pure form geometries — so progressive, yet so old,” he says. “They are simplicity on a human scale.” And so is Boddam’s oeuvre, which might yet rate him one of the greats. VL For more information, visit danielboddam.com.