Modern Chair

Perhaps an obligatory piece or rite of passage for anyone in my profession, I was able to design and build my own chair as part of a furniture class in Architecture School. The chair is constructed of baltic birch plywood with threaded brass rods. I used a CNC in order to ensure that each of the slats was identical, and most importantly, that the holes for the threaded rod would all line up. Interestingly, the profile for the seat and the back are the exact same shape. I designed ‘Y’ shaped pieces to form the connection between seat, back, and back leg. Vertical pieces were added below the front edge of the seat to act both as spacers to ensure even spacing of the slats, but also act as a beam (the threaded rod at the bottom acts like the tension element and the solid cross section of wood at the top acts like the compression element) to support the load of whoever is sitting in the chair. The legs were made of a pair of profiles that intertwined to form a solid armrest where front and back legs met, and spacers where used at the feet to create a solid surface where they meet the floor. That’s me in one of the photos. You can tell by my hairline just how long ago that was.