21 Chairs is the third and most ambitious chapter in Max Lamb’s ongoing Economy Chair series — a direct descendant of the 60 Chair and 50 Armchair, and the most radical test yet of what one designer, working entirely by hand, can physically accomplish. Where the 60 Chair was a three-day marathon of repetition and the 50 Armchair an expansion of that same geometry into something more generous, the 421 Chairs arrived by way of a prompt: Bottega Veneta’s creative director Louise Trotter asked Lamb to produce 421 chairs for the brand’s Winter 2026 show, premiering February 28th at Palazzo San Fedele in Milan. The number is the seat count of the venue. In accepting, Lamb pushed his hands-on practice to a scale that sits at the threshold between craft and industry, testing the upper limits of what one body and mind can produce.

The chair itself evolves from the same material logic Lamb has refined over 15 years. The original 60 Chair was created from four-inch slabs of expanded polystyrene, hot wire tools of Lamb’s own making, meticulous cutting plans engineered to minimize waste, and a finish of unpigmented rubber applied straight from the barrel. Each piece is cut, assembled, and coated by hand, carrying the slight variation that is the signature of the series. But at 421 units, the arithmetic is staggering — and the form is reconfigured. The 421 Chair stands monolithic: still recognizable as the silhouette of the original 60 Chair, but resolved into a solid block rather than four discrete legs, a change driven by the practical need to coat each chair completely and efficiently in the rubber polymer. That light rubber skin engulfs and strengthens the polystyrene beneath, this time with cut lines and seams left proudly visible, each one a record of the chair’s own making.

Lamb occupies a rare position: a designer by training who, in a field dominated by industrial production, continues to insist on making things himself. The Economy Chair series is his proving ground, testing not just the limits of the chairs, but the body and will behind them.

Max Lamb (b. 1980, St. Austell, Cornwall, England) lives and works in London. Lamb’s works are collected by numerous public institutions around the world, including the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York; the Design Museum Gent in Belgium; the San Francisco Museum of Art; the Odunpazarı Modern Museum in Eskişehir, Turkey; Denver Art Museum in Colorado and Vitra Design Museum in Germany. In 2018 he presented his first institutional solo show Max Lamb: Exercises in Seating at the Art Institute of Chicago.