This is a claim furniture designers should challenge us on. The best of them — Jasper Morrison, Naoto Fukasawa — think architecturally without the architecture training. But the habit of mind is rarer than it should be. So let us be precise about what we mean.

Architects do not make better furniture in all respects. The best dedicated furniture designers — the ones who have spent decades understanding how wood moves seasonally, how joints fail under cyclic loading, how a seat cushion behaves after ten years — have technical knowledge that most architects lack. There are things about chair ergonomics that require obsessive focus on chairs specifically, and architects rarely have that focus.

What architects do have, and what dedicated furniture designers frequently lack, is a systematic way of thinking about how an object exists in space. Not just what it looks like in isolation — photographed against a white backdrop, as most furniture is sold — but how it behaves in a room with specific dimensions, specific light, specific other objects, and specific humans moving through it.

This distinction sounds abstract. It has very concrete design consequences.

The Scale of Observation

Architecture is the design of space. Not walls, not roofs — space. The architect's fundamental unit of work is the void: the volume of air that humans inhabit. Everything else — structure, envelope, materials, light — is in service of shaping that void.

This means that architects develop a specific perceptual skill: they see objects in relationship to space before they see them in isolation. When an architect looks at a table, the first observation is not about the table's form — it is about the table's scale relative to the room, the way it divides or unifies the space beneath it, how the eye travels from the table to the walls behind it, what the table does to the perceived volume of the room.

Industrial design training, by contrast, tends to start with the object. The industrial designer's process is typically: define the functional requirements, develop the form to meet them, refine the form aesthetically, prototype, test. The object is the unit. The environment is a variable that good designers account for, but it is not the starting point.

The difference becomes visible in specific design decisions. An architect designing a dining table thinks about the height of the table in relation to the height of the room. At 2.4m ceiling height (standard in North American residential), a dining table at 740mm feels different than the same table in a room with 3.2m ceilings. The architect adjusts the table's visual weight accordingly — a room with tall ceilings can carry a table with more visual mass; a lower room needs a lighter table or the space feels compressed. This consideration — which is essentially architectural — is often invisible in furniture designed without it, and its absence is perceptible in ways that are difficult to articulate but easy to feel.

From the Barcelona Chair to the Paimio: Architects Who Made Icons

The most celebrated furniture in the Western design canon was designed by architects. This is not coincidence.

Le Corbusier's LC4 chaise longue (1928) is a study in spatial thinking applied to the scale of a body. Corbusier approached the chaise not as a piece of furniture but as an architectural problem: what is the correct geometry for a body at rest, and how should that geometry be supported? The result — a curved body support on a fixed frame, adjustable by moving the body support rather than the frame — is counterintuitive. It was also correct in a way that no conventional furniture designer of the period had arrived at.

Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Chair (1929) is the most rigorous example of architectural proportion work applied to furniture. Every dimension of the Barcelona Chair was determined by proportion relationships that Mies had established across the Barcelona Pavilion for which it was designed. The chair cannot be fully understood outside the room it was designed for — which is precisely the architect's point. Object and space are aspects of a single design act.

Alvar Aalto's Paimio Chair (1932) is the most technically innovative. Aalto, trained as an architect and building the Paimio Sanatorium at the time, approached the chair as a structural problem: how to use plywood — a new industrial material — to achieve the cantilever form he wanted. The solution was a structural innovation that became the basis for nearly a century of bent-plywood furniture design. Aalto was thinking structurally, as architects do. Furniture designers of the period were thinking in upholstery and frames.

Jean Prouvé is perhaps the most compelling precedent because his work explicitly bridges the architectural and the industrial. Prouvé thought about furniture as construction: his tables have structural legs that work the same way his building facades work — thin steel in compression, jointed and bolted in ways that make the structure legible. The Standard Chair (1934) is beautiful because it is honest about what it is: a lightweight structure in two materials, assembled in the most direct way possible.

The Scale Jump: From Building Facades to Table Edges

Moving from buildings to furniture requires adjusting your instrument of measurement, not your way of thinking.

Architecture operates at tolerances of ±5–10mm in most cases. Furniture requires tolerances of ±0.5mm for joints, ±1mm for surface fitting. The precision required is ten times greater. An architect who moves to furniture design must recalibrate their hands — and their eye — to a different scale of precision.

But the mode of thought is identical. When we at Mililab design a piece of furniture, we are running the same mental process we use when we design a room: What is the space the object creates or implies? How does the user's body move in relation to it? What is the visual weight of the object relative to its environment? Where is the primary structural logic, and is it legible?

The scale adjustment is partly about precision — everything has to be tighter — and partly about the shift from experience in motion to experience at rest. A building is experienced through movement; you walk through it, and the space unfolds in time. Furniture is experienced in sustained proximity — you sit at it for two hours, or you see it from the same chair every evening for years. This means that furniture requires a kind of sustained visual quality that architecture does not: the detail that is visible from arm's reach, every day, for forty years, must be more considered than the detail of a building facade that you see once or twice a year.

What does not change between scales: the fundamental commitment to spatial logic over decorative logic. Architectural thinking asks "what does this element do in space?" before "what does this element look like?" This question, applied at furniture scale, produces different answers than the question "what should this look like in the catalog?"

Architecture Training Versus Industrial Design Training

Architecture training is fundamentally about the relationship between structure and space — about understanding how physical things organize the world that humans inhabit. An architecture student spends years learning to think in three dimensions, to understand how light behaves in enclosed volumes, to coordinate systems (structure, envelope, services, interior) into coherent wholes.

Industrial design training is fundamentally about the relationship between form and function — about understanding how objects serve human needs, how they are made, how they are used. An industrial design student spends years learning ergonomics, materials science, production processes, and user research.

Both are rigorous disciplines. They produce different designers with different strengths.

The architect who designs furniture brings: spatial thinking, proportional discipline, structural reasoning, and a habitual attention to how objects exist in their environment. They often lack: deep material knowledge specific to furniture, ergonomic expertise at body scale, production process knowledge.

The furniture designer brings: material knowledge, ergonomic expertise, production understanding, and detailed craft sensibility. They often lack: spatial thinking at room scale, the architect's habitual attention to the object-space relationship.

The best furniture designers have some of each. The great industrial designers — Jasper Morrison, Naoto Fukasawa — think architecturally about their work even without architectural training. The great architect-furniture designers — Aalto, Prouvé — had the production and material knowledge of skilled craftspeople.

At Mililab, we have the architecture training plus the material knowledge we have developed through building the ENWA collection. We do not have fifty years of furniture manufacturing knowledge. But we have something that most furniture studios lack: we design the rooms and the furniture that goes in them simultaneously.

Designing the Room and the Furniture Together

The specific advantage Mililab has over dedicated furniture studios is this: we design both.

When we design an interior for a client, we are thinking about the room's dimensions, its ceiling height, its light quality, its relationship to adjacent spaces, the way the occupant moves through it. When we specify furniture for that interior — whether our own ENWA pieces or pieces from other makers — we are making those choices with the full architectural context in mind.

This gives the ENWA pieces a quality that is difficult to specify but evident when the furniture is in place: they work architecturally. The Sen Dining Table's superellipse was developed by architects designing the rooms it would inhabit. Not the showroom. The room — its ceiling height, its light at 6pm, the way a person moves past it into the kitchen.

The Sen's proportions — the superellipse plan, the tapered edge, the visual weight of the base — were developed by designers who were simultaneously thinking about the rooms the table would inhabit. The height of the Sora Sofa relative to a standard 2.4m ceiling. The visual footprint of the Ishi Stool when viewed from a standing position in an entry space.

These are not considerations that appear in standard furniture design processes, which tend to develop objects in isolation and test them against generic environments. They are considerations that appear automatically in an architectural process, because the room is always present in the architect's mind.

The result is furniture that works in rooms — not just in showrooms, not just in product photography, but in actual spaces with actual light and actual proportions. This is, ultimately, what furniture is for.

The best architect-designed furniture in history has this quality. The Barcelona Chair only fully makes sense in a room with Mies's proportions. The Paimio Chair was designed for a specific room in a specific building. The furniture that endures — that continues to feel right in spaces designed generations after the furniture was made — was designed by people who thought about space first and objects second. That is an architectural habit of mind, and it is the best reason to have architects making furniture.