About — 03
Welder
before designer
coming soon
David Mălăia is a Romanian maker working in steel, welding and reclaimed materials, currently studying Furniture & Interior Architecture at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague.
He trained as a welder before he trained as a designer. That sequence shaped everything that followed: the material was a job long before it was a medium, and the hours spent under a helmet taught a kind of patience that a studio brief cannot. Where many designers hand a drawing to a fabricator, here the drawing, the fabrication and the mistakes all belong to the same person.
The work sits between furniture, object and sculpture, and is built through repetition — one cut, one join, one gesture, carried out again and again until the accumulation becomes form. Scrap and off-cuts are used deliberately: steel that already has a history is more honest than steel that does not.
He works between the workshop in Romania and the studios in The Hague, moving between the two the way the work moves between trade and design.
- BasedRomania — working between Romania and The Hague
- AcademyFurniture & Interior Architecture, KABK — Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
- BackgroundTrained welder
- MaterialsMild steel, reclaimed and salvaged metal, found components
- TechniquesMIG / TIG welding, cutting, grinding, forming, patination
- LanguagesRomanian, English
Approach
Three principles
The hand decides
Form is found while making, not before it. The workshop is the drawing board, and a piece is finished when the material stops arguing.
Repetition as structure
One element, repeated with discipline, builds both the object and its rhythm. The small differences between repeats are kept, not corrected away.
Second-life steel
Reclaimed metal brings its own marks, scale and limits. Working inside those limits is part of the discipline, not a compromise.
Curriculum
CV
- PresentBA Furniture & Interior Architecture — KABK, The Hague
- EarlierProfessional welding training and workshop practice — Romania
- Exhibitionsto be added
- Awardsto be added
- Pressto be added