Fermo by Tobias Faisst in Berlin stops time in vivid blue—a chair that refuses to choose between sculpture and seating, monument and furniture.
There is something almost confrontational about an object that demands you decide what it is. Tobias Faisst's Fermo, saturated in a blue so electric it seems to vibrate against its surroundings, poses exactly this kind of challenge. It looks like a chair. It has four legs, a seat, a back. But sit in it, and you'll understand why the designer chose fermo—Italian for stopped, arrested, fixed—as its name.
The piece exists in deliberate dialogue with the radical furniture experiments of 1980s Italy, when designers at studios like Alchimia declared war on function. They tilted chairs until they became useless, covered sofas in impossible patterns, and turned the living room into a gallery. Faisst's provocation runs in reverse: what if we took something that had become pure sculpture and forced it back into service?
The result is neither comfortable nor entirely impractical. Its proportions feel slightly wrong—the seat pitched at an angle that discourages lingering, the height calibrated for alertness rather than relaxation. You perch on Fermo like a visitor in your own home. This is furniture that keeps you awake, that refuses the easy slide into domestic oblivion.
Shot against raw concrete and brushed plaster in Berlin, the chair's ultramarine surface operates like a punctuation mark in space. Light pools and shifts across its planes throughout the day, revealing geometries that seem to multiply the longer you look. A shadow becomes a second chair. A reflection suggests a third.
What Faisst has made is less a piece of furniture than a proposition about how we might live with objects that demand something from us. In an era of optimized ergonomics and endless customization, Fermo insists on its own terms. The chair will not meet you halfway. It simply waits, blue and uncompromising, for you to decide whether you're willing to stay.
