Developments

Our studio class this semester has been moving at a slower pace than the fall. Last semester, we had three assignments that resulted in three pieces of furniture. This semester, we have one assignment that will result in one or two pieces. I can't say for sure why this is, but I would guess they are hoping we will self-direct our pace and spend more time considering the details. The semi-relaxed atmosphere has been nice but sometimes you need that adrenaline to push you towards the good ideas. Too much consideration can be a bad thing. That said, I hope that is not the case for my chairs. They have been developing slowly, but steadily, and so far I am really pleased with the direction.

The single rope chair has become a grouping which are dependent on each other. The rope of one chair "leg" goes up to the ceiling and comes back down as the "leg" of another chair. In this way, none of the chairs are sit-able unless they are all being used. I have had several recent construction breakthroughs. Instead of bulky knots I have learned how to splice the two ropes together.

This allows my lines to continue uninterrupted, making the chair more like a simple line drawing of a chair. Another added benefit of avoiding knots is in material calculation. Each knot takes up some amount of material and it is difficult to account for it precisely. Another breakthrough has been the seat. Without any internal strength the seat basically collapses upon pressure as there is nothing holding the legs in position. I wanted to use the same material throughout and did not want to hide some sort of internal system. Since the details of the chair design are modeled after the iconic chair, it made sense to make my seat the same way; thus, the woven rush seat.

I ran out of rope (and that is almost 200 feet!) so you aren't getting the complete picture but it is turning out perfectly. I actually might end up leaving a small square in the middle - I like being able to see the single strands passing through the diagonals.

Back from Milan!

I spent the past week in Milan, Italy at the International Furniture Fair. The six-day event plays host to thousands of manufacturers and furniture designers from around the world. The range of people exhibiting is quite wide - from emerging designers looking for people to produce their work to established giants in Italian manufacturing. Most of the booths are located in one huge exhibition center but hundreds more were scattered all over the city.

Three of the other grad girls and myself formed a travel group but there were quite a few other RISD students attending the show. RISD, itself, sponsored a booth and displayed the work of a class that was formed specifically for that purpose.

There was a lot of amazing work and it was interesting to see the entire industry, in all its different forms, together in one place. Our feet were so tired by the end of each day. We were surrounded by furniture but didn't have any time to sit down. Below are some of the highlights.

This is probably my favorite piece from the whole show! I love the leather netting holding the upholstered cushions together.

This table was at the Droog exhibition. The glass vases were placed on the table while still hot creating the burn marks on the table surface and allowing the glass to freely slump into its final shape.

These girls are wearing computers that recognize the black and white images scattered about the room and project a 3D virtual image onto the screen in the headset. The technology was not quite ready for this experience but I enjoyed the idea of capturing the experience of furniture in a digital format.

This booth is by Front - a group of four girls from Sweden. I always like their work.

This was one of my favorite booths. At the end of my time at RISD I have to put together a show of my own work. The space we are given is basically a white box but we are allowed to do pretty much anything to it as long as it is reversible. I got a lot of good ideas from the booths at Milan.

This was a close second in terms of favorite. The drawers move back and forth but are set to stop so the whole system never gets unbalanced.

Animation

I put together a short animation of the original line model. I hope this captures more fully the spirit of the piece. I think the medium is an effective way of communicating for this project so I anticipate doing some similar videos of the full-scale versions.

Rope chair

I have been delaying posting on my project for chair studio because I didn't think I had very good supporting images. I think though, that this particular project will just be hard to photograph so I apologize in advance. Just imagine that everything you see is ten times cooler in person and makes ten times more sense.

That said, I decided to build the chair made out of rope. I know when I originally posted the model for the project I claimed that it would not scale up and maintain its charm. However, I decided to hope for the best and move forward. There were a number of other ideas I was drawn to (particularly the receipt chair and the chair based on extruded geometry) but for a number of other reasons I settled on the unknown.


My process has been to gradually move up in scale while keeping all the other factors pretty much the same. Just today I finished the full-scale version and am finally beginning to consider changing some of the formal aspects of the chair.


My plan is to just keep building the chairs at full-scale and to make decisions along the way in response to what has come before. In the end, I imagine I will have somewhere between eight and twelve chairs. My hope is that at least four of those are sit-able.