---
title: "Takuto Ohta didn't design 50 pieces of furniture. He tested 200 logs"
locale: "en"
url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/log-x-two-hundred-logs-en"
markdown_url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/log-x-two-hundred-logs-en.md"
category: "craft"
tags: ["Takuto Ohta", "log x", "wood", "furniture", "SKWAT", "reuse", "experimentation"]
published_at: "2026-08-22T09:38:00.000Z"
author: "Hugo Marchal"
translation: "https://irz.fr/fr/articles/log-x-two-hundred-logs-fr.md"
---

# Takuto Ohta didn't design 50 pieces of furniture. He tested 200 logs

log x began with roughly 200 irregular Yoshino cedar logs, not a finished collection. For two months, each cut became a test the next log could inherit.

At SKWAT in Tokyo, the furniture began life as roughly cut cedar sections that visitors could already use as seats. Ohta had not yet decided what else they might become.

Those Yoshino cedar sections were spread through the café as both seating and stockpile. A visitor could sit on a log one week and return later to find the same piece split, cut or joined into something more deliberate; showroom, workshop and timber rack occupied the same room.[2](https://db.bitstar.tokyo/instagram/54951?content=posts&page=2)

There were roughly **200 logs** in the batch. About two months later, Designboom counted **around 50 functional pieces** made from them.[3](https://www.designboom.com/design/takuto-ohta-200-leftover-cedar-logs-evolving-furniture-system/) Read in isolation, those numbers suggest a recycling exercise; the actual sequence points to something closer to material research.

Ohta arrived without fifty furniture drawings or a plan for a finished collection; he had two hundred pieces of timber that did not agree with one another, and he began cutting to find out which ideas could survive repetition.

## The awkward stock

The cedar came from Yoshino in Nara Prefecture and had already been used in a temporary installation, including on the rooftop of GINZA SIX.[1](https://www.japandesign.ne.jp/designer/312_takuto_ohta/log-x)[2](https://db.bitstar.tokyo/instagram/54951?content=posts&page=2)[3](https://www.designboom.com/design/takuto-ohta-200-leftover-cedar-logs-evolving-furniture-system/) When Ohta acquired it, that exhibition was over. The timber had no obvious next job.

This was not neat workshop stock. Diameters and lengths varied, and surfaces carried marks from previous use. Each log also had a long relief kerf made during processing to reduce uncontrolled cracking as the wood dried.[1](https://www.japandesign.ne.jp/designer/312_takuto_ohta/log-x)[3](https://www.designboom.com/design/takuto-ohta-200-leftover-cedar-logs-evolving-furniture-system/)

A conventional furniture workflow might treat those differences as errors to remove, milling the logs down and establishing standard dimensions before design begins; Ohta kept much of the inherited geometry visible, which turns every log into a slightly different question.

The workshop can therefore ask questions that a standardized billet would erase. Which cuts survive a change in diameter? Which joints work on the next piece, and when does the drying kerf become useful geometry rather than a defect to disguise?

> **Design begins with variation**
> - Define a form, then make parts conform to it.: Conventional collection
> - Receive 200 different forms, then find operations that can travel between them.: log x
> - Diameter, length, kerf, cracks and traces of previous use.: Variables
> - A family connected by operations rather than one master drawing.: Result
> IRZ synthesis from Ohta, SKWAT and Designboom.

The `x` in log x is useful because the project page presents it as a variable, leaving the result unresolved at the start.[1](https://www.japandesign.ne.jp/designer/312_takuto_ohta/log-x)[2](https://db.bitstar.tokyo/instagram/54951?content=posts&page=2) That sounds like branding until the workshop method shows the unknown doing actual work.

## Use it now

Before a saw touches the timber, the stockpile is part of the exhibition itself: at SKWAT, people already need somewhere to sit.

That temporary use matters because reuse projects often include a waiting period in which material has ceased to be one thing but has not yet become another; here the stock participates from day one, ready to be sat on, moved, examined and eventually removed from the grid for another experiment.[2](https://db.bitstar.tokyo/instagram/54951?content=posts&page=2)

> Illustration: log x installation at SKWAT with cedar logs distributed through the space. The inventory is already part of the exhibition: logs operate as temporary seats and as raw material for the next experiments. Credit: [Takuto Ohta](https://www.designboom.com/design/takuto-ohta-200-leftover-cedar-logs-evolving-furniture-system/).

In a March 2026 account of a photography research trip to Tokyo, Stavros Messinis writes about the arrangement in ordinary use: participants at an unrelated discussion sit on log x sections and lean on the project while it is still unfinished.[4](https://m-artlens.com/tokyo-research-trip-japanese-photography/)

As pieces are transformed, the exhibition changes with them. Stock becomes prototype, then furniture, before returning to the same room. There is no clean backstage where development waits out of sight until opening night.

## One cut, then another

Designboom says there was no predetermined collection. Ohta worked directly with cutting, joining and assembly, carrying promising forms and construction techniques over to other logs as the experiment moved forward.[3](https://www.designboom.com/design/takuto-ohta-200-leftover-cedar-logs-evolving-furniture-system/)

The crucial point is the sequence: an operation is allowed to prove itself in wood before it is promoted into a rule for the rest of the collection.

If a cut makes one awkward trunk stable enough to sit on, the useful discovery may be the cut rather than the resulting chair; the next log can immediately test whether the idea depended on one lucky diameter or deserves to become a method.

Joining follows the same logic: a connection that works once is an object detail, while a connection that tolerates several different logs starts to look like a small piece of knowledge about the material.

> Illustration: Takuto Ohta working on a cedar log during the log x making process. Every piece is also a material test. A convincing technique can move directly to the next log instead of waiting for a separate prototyping phase to end. Credit: [Takuto Ohta](https://www.designboom.com/design/takuto-ohta-200-leftover-cedar-logs-evolving-furniture-system/).

The relief kerf shows why this approach produces different furniture. Ohta did not design the slit for log x; it was already present because of the cedar drying process.[1](https://www.japandesign.ne.jp/designer/312_takuto_ohta/log-x) By keeping that trace available as geometry, he allows a decision made in lumber processing to influence a chair years later.

By the time roughly fifty pieces have emerged, they are connected less by a single visual template than by this chain of experiments.[3](https://www.designboom.com/design/takuto-ohta-200-leftover-cedar-logs-evolving-furniture-system/) Some are stools, some tables, some benches. Their family resemblance comes from repeated operations meeting different pieces of wood.

## The second product

Furniture is only one output. Ohta and SKWAT also describe a plan to document and classify the cuts and carving methods developed during the project.[1](https://www.japandesign.ne.jp/designer/312_takuto_ohta/log-x)[2](https://db.bitstar.tokyo/instagram/54951?content=posts&page=2) The aim is to preserve the operation as well as the object it happened to produce.

That changes what counts as a successful prototype, because a chair can fail commercially and still expose a useful way of splitting a log, while a beautiful one-off object may teach very little if the operation behind it cannot survive another piece of timber.

> **Object or method?**
> - Apply a cut, carving operation or joint to a real log.: Try
> - See what the geometry and timber actually tolerate.: Observe
> - Relate the technique to variants already tested.: Classify
> - Apply a successful operation to another log or, ideally, transmit it.: Reuse
> The taxonomy is the potentially reusable product behind the furniture.

Looked at this way, the approximately fifty finished objects become test records. A stool proves one structural proposition long enough for somebody to sit on it; a table records another. Pieces that never became convincing furniture still belong to the research, even if they are less likely to appear in photographs.

The exhibition format matters because experiments happen at full scale, in public, with the same material that later has to carry bodies and survive ordinary use; a tiny foam model cannot settle the same questions as a heavy cedar log.

## The open-source claim

The project becomes less tidy when it reaches the phrase “open source”. To be sure, the ambition is clearly documented; the public artefact implied by that phrase is harder to locate.

Ohta’s 2025 page and SKWAT’s presentation say that useful techniques are intended to be documented, categorized and made public as open-source information.[1](https://www.japandesign.ne.jp/designer/312_takuto_ohta/log-x)[2](https://db.bitstar.tokyo/instagram/54951?content=posts&page=2) The language is prospective: it describes what the documentation is supposed to become.

A later article from March 2026 speaks of techniques being documented and shared,[4](https://m-artlens.com/tokyo-research-trip-japanese-photography/) so there is evidence that the documentation effort continued. After checking the public material again on August 22 2026, we could not find the artefact implied by the stronger claim. There is no repository, downloadable manual, PDF catalogue or public dataset containing the announced taxonomy that we could locate.

Designboom's new article, published on August 21, describes the categorization of variations and the way the process can be read and compared, but it likewise provides no link to an open corpus.[3](https://www.designboom.com/design/takuto-ohta-200-leftover-cedar-logs-evolving-furniture-system/)

> **Separate the promise**
> - Operations were tested, categorized and reapplied during the project.: Verified
> - Effective methods were intended for release as open-source data.: Announced
> - Public project pages, photographs and process descriptions.: Located
> - A repository, file or manual containing the announced taxonomy.: Not located
> IRZ research status, August 22 2026.

A careful description therefore stops short of saying that log x published an open-source furniture system, because the project **built a process around documentation and announced an open release of useful methods, while the complete public release remains unverified**.

The distinction is practical rather than pedantic. Showing how you worked is different from giving somebody else enough material to repeat the work. Reuse by another maker asks for dimensions, procedures, edge cases, perhaps failed tests, plus a stable place where all of that survives after the exhibition closes.

log x already has the interesting half of that problem: it treats a manufacturing operation as something worth naming and comparing rather than invisible workshop trivia. Publishing the resulting taxonomy would turn that habit into transferable infrastructure.

## What the scars say

The finished furniture stays close to its source material. Designboom’s photographs show substantial trunks rather than cedar processed into anonymous boards, so the inherited kerfs, proportions and marks remain easy to read.[3](https://www.designboom.com/design/takuto-ohta-200-leftover-cedar-logs-evolving-furniture-system/)

That rough continuity preserves evidence of the negotiation that produced each object. The cost of standardizing every log into the same clean rectangular stock would be the loss of much of that evidence, even if the finished furniture became tidier.

The experiment begins to resemble field research conducted with saws: Ohta acts, the material answers, and the next log checks whether that answer travels.

After two months, some answers have become furniture while others remain methods, failures or possibilities. The exhibition can contain all of them because the project started before anyone knew exactly what the final collection would be.

Most furniture exhibitions show what survived the design process; log x is more revealing because the design process itself is what survives.

## References

1. [Takuto Ohta, log x, Japan Design Net, September 4 2025](https://www.japandesign.ne.jp/designer/312_takuto_ohta/log-x)
2. [SKWAT, log x presentation, July 2025](https://db.bitstar.tokyo/instagram/54951?content=posts&page=2)
3. [Takuto Ohta, log x, Designboom, August 21 2026](https://www.designboom.com/design/takuto-ohta-200-leftover-cedar-logs-evolving-furniture-system/)
4. [Stavros Messinis, Learning Through Encounter on the Tokyo Research Trip, m-artlens, March 7 2026](https://m-artlens.com/tokyo-research-trip-japanese-photography/)