LIVING IN THE SENSORY WORLD WITH LUAM MELAKE

Imagine a chair that can support a busy mom who’s juggling work, kids, and a global pandemic. What would that look like? For Luam Melake, it takes the form Supportive Chair, a piece that encourages an open posture with the head lifted, arms relaxed, and back arched—a throat opener that calms you down by activating your parasympathetic nervous system. Trained as an architect at the University of California, Berkeley, Melake explores how design can foster deeper social connections. Her 2023 exhibition at R & Company, Furnishing Feelings, featured furniture explicitly crafted to encourage intimacy and eye contact, transforming everyday seating into tools for emotional engagement. With her Supportive Chair, you can also sit with your legs crossed and back upright in a meditation pose, or with up to two other people at the same time, connecting with one another in various configurations — Melake estimates there are about eight different ways that people can position their bodies around the piece. If you’re really struggling, she says, someone can sit beside you, and through a notch in the back, cradle you with their arm, an embrace that’s basically a hug. “That’s the problem with chairs — you can’t hug in them,” Melake says. “This chair allows you to do that.” Another one of her creations, the Listening Chair, fits someone sitting upright and another person laying across them — a Freudian pose that encourages more open dialogue, she says. Melake is currently a Senior Researcher at the Healthy Materials Lab at Parsons School of Design, and this keen interest in materials extends to her own practice; Melake wanted to make light, soft furniture without upholstery, with a nontoxic finish she sourced from zoo habitats — she coats the foam sculptures with a glossy, pigmented urethane that doesn’t off-gas or degrade from being touched. Her sculptural investigations of human behavior seek to do what many things in our modern age promise, yet fail to deliver: make us feel better. “The work I’m making now is about social interaction, and counteracting this digital age we live in, which is alienating us,” she says. “I love to live in the sensory world, and I hate that that’s being infringed upon by big corporations.”