Miami Design Week heralds the newest in stylistic approach and formal/functional balance, bringing minds from around the globe together to share their vision.  From Hungarian company IVANKA, these chairs carry with them a certain gravitas, but certainly seem to favor form.

Ponderous, yes. Formal, absolutely. The collection is called QTZ, and is the result of a collaboration between IVANKA and Alexander Lotersztain.

As an accessory for a city park, civil engineers may wish to take note of outdoor furnishings that look so striking. The chairs are cast in a geometric sensibility, using naturally occurring crystal as a central referent. And so they appear to be natural developments, or expressions, of the hidden and patient efforts of the earth itself.

The collection includes a table, a footrest, and lounging seating, and is comprised of special concrete blends, which result in unusual surfaces; the pieces are hand ground and hand finished, and available in suitably monochromatic color tones.

As far as comfort is concerned, the pieces are designed more as riffs of functional sculpture, to be appreciated visually, commented upon, and considered.

The collection is the brainchild of Lotersztain, an Australian designer born in Argentina. Lotersztain is best known for his design of the Limes Hotel in Brisbane, working a naturalistic sense of accident into the building’s façade and a playful sense of functionality within. His work many times uses geometric sensibilities to convey a message of naturalistic cohesion between human artifice and evolutionary accident, working asymmetry and the geometric into an overall sense of familiarity.