My Favorite Chair

[4DThinker]

Another blast from my past.  I still have and use this chair.  I designed it when in college in 1981.

Do you have a favorite seat in your house?   I've helped hundreds of students design and build original chairs.  There is a greater expectation we have for chairs compared to table or cabinet designs.  Structure, comfort, are not as obvious challenges when the projects holds a dynamic human.  Usually there is at least one, and often two rough prototypes made before finalizing details for chair designs. A solid seat that is uncomfortable to sit in gets a "C" at best in the advanced furniture design classes we taught. 

More details and background about this chair are now on my blog here. 

 

4D

[lew]

Looks really comfortable! I agree about the solid seat- not my favorite.

[4DThinker]

There are two national Furniture Design competition my students would enter.  AWFS Fair Design Emphasis and IWF's Fresh Wood.  Of the seating projects my students made the ones with soft seats (no hard surface) would nearly always win an award. I had a judge tell me one year that my students chair design was the chair the judges preferred to sit in while filling out their score cards for the projects. His chair used 1" wide backpack strapping as the seat and back surface, spanning between the sides. He could "tune" how taught each strap was and spent time making what looked like a flat plane of straps more contoured to match body curves when you sat in it. He was an architecture student taking my chair design elective class.  After winning First Place in seating that year he pursued making a production run of his design.  I don't know how that turned out, but his chair was very comfortable to sit in. 

4D