Hot on the heels of yesterday's Nendo post comes more Milan news from the Japanese design studio.

The team will also be exhibiting their new 'Bamboo-Steel' chair at La Triennale di Milano; and they'll also be designing the exhibition space.

Nendo created the chair for the National Taiwan Craft Research Institute (a body concerned with the revitalization and development of Taiwan’s traditional crafts skills and industries) as part of the Institute’s 'Yii' series.

The Yii series is a project art-directed by Gijs Bakker, co-founder of Droog Design.

"Our task was to discover sources for new designs through research into Taiwan’s traditional bamboo handicrafts and furniture." say Nendo.

"We were fascinated by bamboo-working techniques, and decided to draw our inspiration from these, rather than to work with the material itself. We applied bamboo-working techniques to tubular steel pipes, which can be easily mass-produced with standard levels of quality."

This borrowing of bamboo handicraft techniques; like weaving together thinly sliced sections and joining parts by wrapping them around each other, allowed Nendo to give the hard metal a sense of pliancy.

"The bamboo artisans visited the metal workshop regularly, and we had many conversations about the project and its capacities."

And so, this bamboo-steel chair is the fruit of these conversations; a symbol of new futures for traditional crafts through the cross-fertilization of different techniques and materials.

The show opens on April the 12th, and runs for the duration of the Salone del Mobile.

Photography Masayuki Hayashi.