So Koizumi Revives Asphalt as Binding Agent in New Furniture Series
Designer So Koizumi’s new furniture series, As, excavates asphalt from its contemporary association with road surfaces to recover its original function – an adhesive medium that has connected disparate materials for millennia.
This archaeological approach to materiality transforms a substance associated with modern banality into something approaching alchemical sophistication.
The material beneath our feet – typically dismissed as utilitarian infrastructure – holds forgotten potential as a sophisticated binding agent.
Reviving a Forgotten Material
The revelation that Jomon-period inhabitants of Japan used asphalt to fasten stone arrowheads to wooden shafts 10,000 years ago provides the collection’s conceptual foundation.
Koizumi treats this historical precedent not as novelty but as technical precedent, positioning asphalt as what he terms a mediator – a substance whose essential character involves negotiating relationships between otherwise incompatible elements.
The series comprises stools, side tables, lighting fixtures, and wall-mounted objects, each exploring how metal, stone, and resin might achieve structural and visual coherence through asphalt’s binding properties.
A Material Authorship Approach
What distinguishes Koizumi’s methodology is his insistence on material authorship.
Rather than sourcing standardized asphalt, he shapes and finishes the material himself, collapsing the traditional boundary between material specification and fabrication.
This hands-on approach recalls the studio pottery movement’s rejection of industrial standardization, though applied to a substance traditionally handled by civil engineers rather than craftspeople.
Investigating Material Energies
Through repeated cycles of mixing, heating, and forming, Koizumi develops asphalts with varied structures and textures specific to each object’s requirements – effectively creating a palette of asphalts rather than deploying a single formulation across the collection.
The furniture reads as material experiments made legible through functional forms.
A stool might reveal how asphalt behaves under compression when binding stone to metal.
Learning More
To learn more about As by So Koizumi, please visit sokoisumi.com.
Photography by So Koizumi, MATOYA.
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