LAVA creates miniature Panton chair for touring exhibition

LAVA creates miniature Panton chair for touring exhibition

Chris Bosse sliced up the Panton chair as part of the Miniatures and Multiples exhibition at SGAR Gallery Brisbane 1st April – 1st May, 2011. The exhibition features 18 of Australian designers and artists who explore ways to create finely crafted one-of-a-kind and limited edition products not meant for mass production.

He chose a design classic that relates to current design and manufacturing techniques.

The gravity defying Panton chair c1967 by Danish designer Verner Panton was a radical departure from traditional design and manufacturing techniques. It anticipated the digital revolution by 30 years and is the first freeform, organic molded piece of furniture.

“I’ve chosen to represent this shape as slices, similar to an MRI scan in order to make visible its complex 3dimensional content. The chair is carved out of a box and sliced and the negative box is exhibited as well,” says Bosse.  “The project retro-digitises the chair design, although it was the chair that preceded the digital design revolution.”

“What made the Panton chair so spectacular when it came on the market and what makes it so interesting today in terms of design history is not only its shape, which is as extravagant as it is elegant, but also the fact that it was the first chair made out of one piece of plastic. It exploited the possibilities offered by the raw material both consistently and to the limits of what was technically achievable.”

“In the nineties digital architecture was more interested in the generation of form, rather than its buildability, materiality, assembly. The slicing enables us to read the geometry like the pages of a book, slice by slice. It is also the only way to approximate 3-dimensional curvature in a 2-dimensional way and make it buildable at any scale.”

Bosse believes that today we understand better how to derive form from geometry, underlying geometries in nature, and incorporate buildability into the form from the inception, through parametric modeling techniques.