Animal chairs

When you take off the skin of a cow, there’s the meat. When you take off the meat, you have the skeleton. My chairs are constructed like a creature: skeleton, meat, skin. I reconstruct metal frames I found on the dump based on anatomic rules. Like an archeologist who finds a dinosaur skeleton.

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The construction of modern seating furniture borrows a lot from the animal kingdom. This was what I observed after a visit at the furniture manufacturer ‘Montis’. Skeletons of steel tube carry a thick package of rubber foam muscles, covered by a layer of white polyester fleece and are in the end covered by a skin of leather.

Only one difference compared to nature’s model is striking: The underlying skeleton structure has nothing in common with the sleek, designed form of the chair. It only serves as a support.

What would these furniture pieces look like, if one would let them grow?

If we would use the skeleton as a basis, build up muscles where necessary, put on fat where padding is needed and tailor the skin to the movements of the body?

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Without further ado I was rifling through the nearby junk yard on the lookout for suitable remains. Old metal chair became for me archeological treasures and I set about recreating the original creature.

By adding muscles where I considered it anatomically correct and modelling them into shape, the creature more and more started to take shape.

I sewed the skin from artificial leather. For a tall grown slim creature I tailored an elegant pinstripe suit. The cutting pattern developed from the extremities: lower leg, upper leg, bottom.
Every chair features zip fasteners to allow the whole skin to be taken off and layed out flat on
the floor.

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