Chainmail Chair
A reworking of William Katavolos's 1952 T-Chair with a hand-linked steel chainmail seat, by Mexico City studio Panorammma
The Only Metal That Hangs Like Cloth
Panorammma rebuilds the 1952 T-Chair with a seat of hand-linked steel rings that drapes the way the original leather did.
In 1952 three young Pratt graduates, William Katavolos, Ross Littell and Douglas Kelley, designed a chair made mostly of gravity. A slim metal frame shaped like a T, with a leather sling hung across it. The seat found its shape by sagging.
Nearly seventy years later, the Mexico City studio Panorammma kept the frame and traded the leather for chainmail: steel rings linked by hand, then plated in nickel. Chainmail is the one metal that behaves like cloth. It folds, it pools, it takes the shape of whatever presses on it. Soldiers once wore it for exactly that reason. Butchers still do.
Look at the two frames in the gallery where the chair stands half taken apart. The posts are bare and the seat lies on the floor in a heap, a puddle of rings with no shape of its own. Hang it back on the T and it becomes a chair again.
Panorammma calls chainmail an old craft that somehow looks industrial and modern. They wanted the chair to question our wish for constraint.
A chair usually holds its shape so you don't have to. This one waits for you to give it one.
Panorammma's Chainmail Chair uses William Katavolos's 1952 T-Chair as its starting point, a canonical piece of postwar furniture design built around a T-shaped tubular frame. The structure is retained; the seat is replaced. Where Katavolos used leather, Maika Palazuelos substitutes hand-linked metal rings, a mesh assembled from individually connected pieces of steel that drapes across the frame under its own weight.
The material choice is specific. Chainmail is a construction technique with a long history in protective armour, where its value lies precisely in combining strength with flexibility. Applied to a chair seat, it does the same thing structurally: the mesh distributes load across the linked rings while remaining pliable enough to conform to the body. The result is a seat that is both visibly hard and functionally soft, holding its form when unoccupied and yielding when sat in.
The contrast between the rigid T-frame and the draped mesh is the piece's central formal tension. Panorammma's practice consistently positions functional objects within broader narratives, and the Chainmail Chair sits within that logic: a reference to medieval armour applied to a domestic seating typology, displacing both references just enough to make the object feel like neither one.
