The Minneapolis-based company Blu Dot, a collaboration of three entrepreneurial designers, John Christakos, Maurice Blanks, and Charlie Lazor, was founded on the belief that good design isn’t all that good if no one can afford it. Trained as architects and sculptors and relentlessly pragmatic in their minimalist approach to both the aesthetic and financial economics of design, their success as a company is based on a drive, not unlike Ikea’s, to produce the best possible design at the least possible cost. They do this by analyzing a given furniture type until they get to the nut of it, then designing reductively until, as Antoine de Sainte-Exupery put it, “There is nothing left to take away.” Blu Dot takes obvious pleasure in the names it gives to its designs—in the metaphorical overtones, for instance, of its Buttercup Chairs, whose petals are open to receive you as though you were a visiting butterfly or bee. The Buttercups, a swivel chair and a rocker, are manufactured using a technique pioneered by mid-century designer Charles Eames for bending layers of thin veneers into curved plywood shells. The stainless steel of the bases is oriented flatwise, miming the broad, relaxed flats of the arms. The chairs’ wood and steel components talk to each other in harmony, particularly in the rocker, the shape of its base a sympathetic reflection in steel of the curves of the plywood above.

— From Glenn Gordon's essay, Sculpture Designed to be Used.