Soo No. 2 Chair by Sangin Park is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2026 Silver A' Design Award in Furniture Design Competition Category.
SilverFurniture· 2026
Soo No. 2 Chair
by Sangin Park
Silver A' Design Award Winner in Furniture Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #179701The Design
About Soo No. 2 Chair
Soo No. 2 is a wooden chair designed for everyday seating. In most chairs the rear legs continue upward to support the backrest. In Soo No. 2 the rear legs and the backrest supports are separated into independent elements. The separation improves structural stability and creates a clear visual balance. The legs are cylindrical and the seat is woven with Danish cord. All structural joints use mortise and tenon joinery, and through joints form small diamond-shaped details along the sides of the frame. The armrests and backrest supports are fixed with discreet brass pins.
The Recognition
About the Silver A' Design Award
Soo No. 2 Chair is a Silver A' Design Award winner, an extraordinarily prestigious recognition granted to top-of-the-line, gorgeous, and impressive designs. Silver winners are tremendously brilliant and exceedingly creative works that illustrate the outstanding expertise, talent, and acuity of their designers. Soo No. 2 Chair is expected to be a wonderful, showpiece work that is remarkably professional and profoundly innovative. This Silver A' Design Award-winning design is a highly notable, admired invention that benefits and advances the boundaries of art, science, design, and technology. Soo No. 2 Chair is a vastly envied creation that evokes desires, introduces positive feelings, and sparks amazement and wonderment.
Interviews
Design Interview
What is the main principle, idea and inspiration behind your design?
The core principles behind this design are structural stability and the inheritance of tradition. I spent a long time observing the structures of chairs that have been loved for generations. Instead of looking at their beautiful exteriors, I studied their underlying frameworks. It is truly amazing that they designed chairs that are both functionally and aesthetically perfect. Seeing how each chair offered a different solution to achieve physical stability provided me with the greatest inspiration.
What has been your main focus in designing this work? Especially what did you want to achieve?
My main focus was on improving the side profile of the chair. In my personal opinion, the side views of many chairs often feel less appealing compared to their front views. I concluded that this limitation is caused by the dependent position and angle between the back legs and the backrest. By structurally separating these two elements, I gained complete design freedom. What I ultimately wanted to achieve was a chair that possesses a beautiful and perfectly balanced silhouette from the side.
What are your future plans for this award winning design?
My immediate plan for this award winning design is to pair it with a new dining table. I am currently developing a table that shares the exact same structural nuance and aesthetic language as this chair. Ultimately I want to host a solo exhibition where this chair and the new table are presented together to beautifully fill a single space.
Grand Interview
The separation of rear legs from backrest support in the Soo No. 2 Chair stands as a structurally bold decision that challenges one of the most deeply entrenched conventions in chair design. Could you walk us through the exact moment you realized this structural separation was not only possible but necessary, and how that insight fundamentally reshaped your understanding of what a chair could be at both a formal and a mechanical level?
By the time I was designing the seventh of the twelve chairs I planned in 2025, I felt I had figured out a certain formula that a chair should follow. As a result, the design of that month did not change much compared to the previous month. I was not satisfied with this lack of change. I realized that altering the configuration of the rear legs and the extended backrest support, which were the parts I had left largely untouched, would bring a significant shift to the overall design. This mechanical separation proved that a chair does not need to follow convention to be honest. It reshaped my understanding by showing that true structural stability comes from assigning a clear and dedicated purpose to every single wooden part.
The Soo No. 2 Chair emerged from a year-long discipline of building twelve distinct chairs, a practice-based commitment that is rare in contemporary furniture design. How did this iterative process of full-scale making alter your understanding of the relationship between a designer's accumulated knowledge and the physical act of construction, and what did the Soo No. 2 Chair ultimately reveal that the previous eleven chairs were unable to?
My first design was a simple stool. A seat height of 465 millimeters felt perfectly appropriate for my body. I built my first chair using that exact same measurement, but the result was surprisingly uncomfortable. A chair requires a person to lean against a backrest, and this physical action fundamentally changes the human posture. I was amazed to discover how such small numerical variations dictate overall comfort. The iterative process taught me that accumulated knowledge is essentially useless unless it is physically tested and proven in a new environment. The Soo No. 2 Chair was born by carefully gathering only the proven strengths of the previous eleven chairs. The final piece demonstrates a structure that is entirely simple, physically sturdy, and visually stable.
The Soo No. 2 Chair arrives at a moment when digital fabrication and engineered composites dominate much of the furniture industry, yet the design insists on solid white oak and traditional mortise and tenon joinery. In what specific ways do you believe the Soo No. 2 Chair demonstrates that craft-based, material-honest construction can offer something that technology-driven manufacturing cannot, particularly in terms of the felt, lived experience of sitting in the object every day?
While a chair is fundamentally a tool for resting and its primary purpose can be easily fulfilled regardless of the chosen material, the connection between the user and the object can change significantly depending on the perspective of the person looking at the furniture. Building with a natural material like wood naturally evokes a much warmer emotional response, and knowing that a piece is carefully crafted for a few individuals, rather than being mass produced in a factory, brings a unique sense of specialness. I believe this quiet appreciation ultimately becomes a profound joy in everyday life.
Behind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- The most distinctive feature of this chair is the design of its rear legs. While conventional chairs extend the rear legs upward to support the backrest as two vertical columns, this approach was reconsidered in terms of structural stability. By separating the rear legs from the backrest support as independent elements, the design achieves both enhanced structural integrity and a clear sense of visual balance.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- Width 580mm x Depth 640mm x Height 770mm
- Tags
- chair, chair design, woodworking
- Production Technology
- In realizing this chair, certain elements were intentionally kept traditional, including the cylindrical legs and a seat woven with Danish cord. Special attention was required where the squared frame members meet the round legs. All Structural joints are crafted using mortise and tenon joinery, with through mortise and tenon joints forming subtle diamond-shaped details along the frame sides. The armrests and back rest supports are fixed with discreet brass pins, preserving the clarity and simplicity of the overall shape.
- Design Challenge
- Design is shaped by the social and cultural context in which it is produced. Working within the Korean cultural context, where floor-based living has historically shaped furniture traditions, forms such as chests and low tables developed more clearly than chairs. This absence can create uncertainty for contemporary woodworkers, who often reference traditional architecture when designing chairs. This project began by questioning whether traditional forms were created primarily for aesthetic expression or as practical responses to life and the human body. Rather than replicating inherited forms, the focus shifted toward designing a chair that responds to bodily experience and everyday use.
- Research
- Type of Research :
Practice-based design research.
Research Objective :
To explore how visual stability and comfort interact in chair design.
Methodology :
Full-scale making and iterative adjustment of structure and angles.
Data Collection and Research Tools Used :
Physical prototypes, sitting tests, and dimensional comparison.
Participants or Experiments :
Separating rear legs from backrest support to resolve structural conflict.
Results :
Greater formal freedom and improved balance.
Insights :
Because rear legs and backrest supports perform different roles and absorb forces differently when seated, separating them—beyond concerns of material efficiency—allows chair design to become more flexible and expressive.
Impacts :
The study contributes to furniture design by demonstrating how structural separation can expand formal possibilities while improving everyday seating comfort. - Inspiration
- The chair was inspired by 12 months of building 12 different chairs, during which the relationship between the rear legs and the backrest support became a recurring concern. In conventional designs, rear leg placement that improves stability often compromises posture, while configurations that support proper seating increase the risk of tipping, with angled legs further distorting the overall form. These tensions led to the decision to separate the two functions into distinct structural elements
- Project Duration
- This chair is the final outcome of a personal project involving the creation of 12 different chairs over a 12 month period. The making of this chair itself, including the final wax finish, took approximately twenty days. However, the process of determining the appropriate shapes and compositions for each part took place almost a year. The chair was crafted in December 2025 in Go-yang City, on the outskirts of Seoul, South Korea.
- Operation Flow
- A chair is the piece of furniture that comes into closest contact with the human body. Beyond visual appeal, it must satisfy the highly subjective requirement of comfort. As the position and proportion of each element strongly shape the user’s experience, several dimensions were referenced from a classic chair by Hans J. Wegner, known for its balanced and familiar comfort. Interestingly, adopting only selected measurements leads to a distinctly new experience, revealing the unique and subtle nature of how a chair interacts with the human body.
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