Cubus Chair

Full description

The inherent cultural meanings (as well as the interpretation and manipulation of archetypal design typologies) is a well-established research field within design and design theory. The 'Cubus Chair' plays with the symbolism of the archetypal chair while employing innovative design and construction methods to achieve a contemporary interpretation.

Made from timber, the traditional material of the chair, its silhouette plays on the stick drawings of chairs typically produced by both adults and children, while its form retains the simple relationship between two flat square planar surfaces, one horizontal, the other vertical, attached to four sticks of roughly equal proportion, which forms the universal, culturally entrenched phenomenological image of the chair. Within the visual boundaries of this simple, angular and geometric silhouette, the seat and backrest planes move though a double curvature. This creates a comfortable seating surface. The innovative torsion box construction method enables the chair to be built with no cross braces or bracketed corners, allowing the design to closely approximate the typical stick drawing of the chair, which although symbolically entrenched in cultural memory, is otherwise virtually impossible to build as a functional object.

This design was selected for a number of local and International exhibitions, most notably for the Berlin design festival, Designmai, Stilwerk Gallery, Berlin; featured on Radio National's Deep End (The Maker) 2006 ABC Radio and podcast with transcripts and images; featured and reviewed in leading design journals and books including Artichoke and Curve, 2004.