Lap Chair is a minimal chair created by Rotterdam-based designer Rachel Griffin of Earnest Studio. The chair’s seemingly simple construction—laser-cut aluminum plates joined through interlocking half-lap joints—offers a meditation on connection that extends far beyond mere furniture making. It is a physical manifestation of how elements come together, how connections can be both functional and beautiful.

Created for the “Specimen” exhibition celebrating fifteen years of Dutch Invertuals, the Lap chair reimagines the fundamental 5TRACKS armchair form. Yet in van de Gruiter’s hands, this canvas becomes an exercise in reduction and precision, where the most essential aspects of chairness are distilled into a series of connected planes.

What first appears as industrial minimalism reveals itself, upon closer inspection, as a thoughtful dialogue between material and process. The 5mm-thick aluminum plates don’t merely connect—they converse through a series of elongated half-lap joints that eliminate the need for additional hardware. These connections become both structural necessity and design language, a vocabulary of intersection that speaks to contemporary production methods while echoing traditional joinery techniques that woodworkers have used for centuries.

The chair’s short folds along plate edges serve multiple masters. They strengthen the otherwise flat material, creating structural integrity through geometry rather than mass. They soften selected edges where human contact occurs, making the otherwise rigid material hospitable to the body. And perhaps most importantly, they establish a visual rhythm—a cadence of light and shadow that activates the form as one moves around it.