SUPERSEDIA emerges from the practice of Markus Töll, rooted in metalworking traditions from northern Italy and shaped by architectural training in Vienna. Founded in 2022, the studio is dedicated to the hand manufacture of seating objects that balance structural rigor with material sensitivity.

Töll’s journey from the Dolomites to the drafting tables of Vienna’s Technical University reveals itself in every geometric gesture of his work. The clean lines and deliberate proportions speak to his architectural training, while the hand-forged details whisper of metalworking traditions learned in northern Italy’s artisanal workshops. This synthesis creates furniture that occupies a unique position neither purely industrial nor craftsman-made, but something entirely new.

The chair forms that emerge from this process embody what Töll calls “rigorous proportionality”, a principle borrowed from architecture but applied with the intimacy of furniture making. Each piece of SUPERSEDIA reduces the essential act of sitting to its most fundamental elements: support, comfort, and presence. The steel frameworks, shaped through careful cutting, welding, and bending, create what Töll describes as “skeletal structures that define a room with their presence and silence.”

Töll’s approach represents a broader movement within contemporary design toward what might be called “neo-craft” – the application of traditional handmaking processes to progressive formal explorations. Unlike the Arts and Crafts movement’s rejection of industrialization, SUPERSEDIA embraces modern materials while insisting on the irreplaceable value of the human hand in shaping them. Each piece carries the maker’s touch, the slight irregularities that distinguish the crafted from the manufactured.