Wabi-sabi: why the design of imperfection fascinates Western culture

Would Andrea Branzi have agreed to link wabi-sabi to his Animali Domestici (Domestic Animals) collection? Perhaps not, but this pivotal work, marking his move beyond the Alchimia and Memphis experiences, does introduce a vivid, almost living simulacrum of nature into the domestic sphere. By framing irregular trunks and branches as design elements, Branzi reawakens our sense of their formal, tactile, and metaphysical beauty.

For Shiro Kuramata, an object is never just functional: it’s a vehicle for spiritual inquiry. In this generous, wire-mesh armchair, Kuramata redefines lightness and invites us to look beyond – to the moon, as its name suggests – to grasp a fleeting moment of poetry and contemplation.

In this series of tables, Nakashima turns joinery into a seamless dialogue between the natural and the crafted. His hybrid pieces reveal wood’s mutable presence without disguise, celebrating its states and metamorphoses.

Between 1990 and 1995, the Droog collective reshaped the meaning of objects according to principles close to wabi-sabi: process over perfection, equality among materials, the embrace of irregularity and the “ugly.” In this porcelain bowl cast from a natural sponge, Marcel Wanders captures the raw materiality of an organic form, breaking from porcelain’s polished codes and distilling nature’s essence in faithful detail.

Often framed through the lens of “tropical baroque,” the Campana brothers’ work also resonates with wabi-sabi, especially in their early icon, the Favela Chair. Built from discarded wood scraps, its spontaneous assembly recalls the idea that beauty can arise from what is deemed worthless. As the Italian songwriter Fabrizio De André once sang, “dal letame nascono i fior (“From manure, flowers bloom”).

In 2004, the French collective 5.5 “hacked” a worn-out bistro chair by fitting it with a conspicuously artificial prosthesis. The result juxtaposes wood and neon-green plastic – nature and synthetic matter – but also evokes healing and rebirth, as the name (“chair treated with a crutch”) suggests. Now a classic of repair design, it’s a kind of kintsugi that replaces gold with a punk spirit.

How can serial production generate uniqueness? Maarten Baas offers an ingenious answer with his Standard Unique series: sixteen kitchen chair components, always the same, can be assembled in countless variations. The result celebrates asymmetry, rough cuts, and imperfection as a new everyday aesthetic.

A longtime devotee of wabi-sabi, Turin-born designer Paola Navone absorbed its sensibility during extended stays in Asia, revisiting it across numerous interiors and installations. Yet beyond her appreciation of the humble and anonymous object, Navone’s true contribution lies in translating wabi-sabi into industrial production. In Gervasoni’s Brick collection, a wax-treated steel top rests on tree trunk sections used as legs: a delicate yet stable balance, suggesting a new coexistence between nature and design.

Will the wabi-sabi of the future be a design of the living? In this lamp made from an algae-based substrate, the natural trace becomes a magnetic presence, functional yet deeply evocative. It redefines beauty through materials many consider “ugly,” exalting a patina that is alive, mutable, and endlessly becoming.