Thinking with Hands | Revisiting Willy Guhl Through Jingwen Wu

In an age defined by the frantic gloss of rapid production and material over-saturation, the act of authentic design becomes a radical act. It is a search not for novel forms, but for novel relationships—between creator and material, object and user, design and time.

This pursuit requires a designer, as the notes on Willy Guhl observe, to be very much aware of the relevance and urgency of the contemporary contexts and realities in which they work. Guhl’s mid-century solutions, born of a world piecing itself back together from scarcity, responded with the clean, systemic logic of industrial ingenuity. His was a philosopher of thinking with your hands, where form followed the unmediated logic of material and need. Today, Jingwen Wu’s ceramic vessels answer a different, more interior urgency: the longing for objects that do not shout but speak, that are not consumed but conversed with, and that welcome time not as a corrosive force but as the essential, final collaborator in beauty. Her practice represents a profound evolution of this haptic philosophy—where systemic production gives way to systemic presence, and craft becomes an inseparable, personal dialect.

A Holistic Reclamation of Use

Both Guhl and Wu begin with a decisive turn away from the ornamental. For Guhl, this was a rejection of the decorative comforts of Swiss Heimatstil; for Wu, it is a quiet bypassing of the expected "elemental" or "oriental" accent. Their work is rooted, instead, in a holistic and human-centered consciousness of use. Guhl famously wrote in 1950 that "our age demands differentiated chair forms that correspond to the differentiated forms of sitting." (Willy Guhl, Studien über Sitzformen, Bauen+Wohnen, Nr. 8, 1950, pp. 25-29) His designs—the relentless curve of the Loop Chair, the pragmatic fold of flat-pack furniture—were not mere furniture but stark, physical dialogues with posture and purpose.

Guhl, Willy, and Renate Menzi. Willy Guhl, Thinking with Your Hands. Lars Müller Publishers, 2023.

Wu initiates a parallel dialogue, but her focus is on the vessel as an interpretative form for the rhythms of metropolitan life. In a landscape of compact living, her vessels are not single-purpose utensils but companions to daily ritual. Objects like the Silver Accent Ceramic Tray — seamlessly transitions from catch-all, ikebana vessel, serveware, to elevation—are studies in lived interiors, holding not just things, but intention and potential. This user-consciousness is not born from exhaustive architectural drawings, but from a Guhl-like exploration of form through use. The creational process for both becomes a record of authenticity. Guhl’s industrial molds captured a moment of material logic; Wu’s hands shaping clay capture a moment of human presence. The object, in each case, becomes a vessel for a moment from the artist and a recorder of time for the user.

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Time as a Collaborator

This relationship with time is where a profound kinship and a decisive divergence unfold. Both designers do not fear aging; they court it, accepting its passage with grace. Guhl’s iconic Loop Chair, cast in fiber cement for the outdoors, is designed to weather. It gathers moss, stains, and scars, its form becoming a gentle monument to the passing decades.

Guhl, Willy, Loop Chairs for Eternit AG Switzerland, 1954

Guhl, Willy, Loop Chair for Eternit SA, 1990s

Wu’s practice elevates this collaboration from the external environment to the internal chemistry of the object itself. Her glazes are not static finishes but living skins. Her silver glazing mellows to a unique gold, transformed by the specific chemistry of the air it shares with its owner. An iron glaze slowly melts, through repeated use and heat, into a black bronze-like texture. Here, time is not just accepted but invited as the final co-artist. The vessel is not complete when it leaves the kiln; it is activated, beginning a silent, lifelong metamorphosis in the user’s hands. This is a timelessness that is deeply personal and dynamic, a far cry from the static “classic.”

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From Systemic Production to the System of the Self

Guhl’s genius was elegantly systemic: he envisioned and built smarter systems for production, distribution, and use. His flat-pack furniture and zero-waste manufacturing were brilliant, logical solutions to the stark material and spatial problems of a post-war world—a world that needed order, efficiency, and clarity.

In our contemporary age of material oversaturation and fast consumption, Wu embodies a new, introverted form of systemic thinking. The system is no longer one of industrial logistics, but of personal ecology. The unique, unrepeatable quality of her glazes and forms is the result of a deeply internalized system—a rhythm absorbed not from a production line, but from the mountain soil of her childhood and the repetitive, meditative cadence of piano practice. She has internalized the slow, inevitable rhythm of growth and the focused state of creation until it becomes a physiology. Her "system" is one of attenuated perception: growth is felt somatically, day by day, a bodily knowledge, not a metric measured from outside. It is tempting, yet insufficient, to label this aesthetic wabi-sabi. The level of authenticity and maturity, or in others acceptance, in her work surpasses a style. It is not an applied philosophy but a lived condition, a way of being in the world that the clay reveals.

This shift marks the new significance of the maker’s object. Today, the paramount innovation is less about inventing a new material, as Guhl did with fibreglass and cement, but about discovering how a primal material like clay can become a form of dialogue through human hands. The dialogue is the innovation.

The Grammar of a Material Dialogue

Here, in the quiet of the studio, craft and design undergo a final, inseparable fusion—all realized by one person, one set of hands that serve as both tool and sensorium. Jingwen Wu, by nature a quiet individual, has cultivated a complete language in the silent materiality of her medium. In her practice, clay becomes her diction. Each compression, each lifting pull of the wall, is a word formed under pressure. Shapes formulate her sentences—a contained curve that speaks of interiority, a flared lip that is an open question. Glazing expresses the emotional undertone, a shifting chromatic mood that alters with the light of different days and the shadow of different hands. And the vessels, as completed entities, become the very syntax for an ongoing, wordless dialogue with another—with the user who pours tea, arranges a solitary fruit, or simply rests a palm upon its surface, completing a circuit of understanding.

Wu’s work is more than exemplary pottery; it is a proposition for a different mode of attention. It answers Guhl’s call for relevance to contemporary reality not with another efficient system for living, but with a profound, systemic poetry for feeling. In a world cacophonous with haste and extraction, her vessels are quiet accomplices that speak the slow, complex grammar of time, care, and beauty. They are, in the end, not merely objects of design, but instruments for a more attentive, resonant, and present life.