Can you plant a chair? You can. In 19th century North America young trees were shaped over the course of several years until they adopted the contours of a chair. Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec were so fascinated by this traditional technique that they came up with the idea of designing a “grown chair.” What has to grow needs time and as such Vegetal was created in an unusually long design process. Now, four years after the first idea emerged, the chair of fibre-reinforced polyamide is about to be presented. Flat branches extend and interweave into an asymmetrical, irregular circle-shaped seating shell. The woven strips are stabilized by ribs which grow downwards and merge with the legs. Viewed from the rear Vegetal looks like a leaf with several stalks and numerous veins branching off.
“As designers, it is our task to find new structures, new construction forms,” explains Ronan Bouroullec with regard to his work: “And this chair is primarily structure and not just a motif.” But how come Vegetal appears to be anything but an assembled construction, more like a single cast? A second inspiring idea which was the result of the Bouroullecs’ intensive work with die casting mingled with the initial idea of the grown chair. “In the die casting process plastic shoots into the form like blood into veins,” says Ronan, “and the finer and more branched the form is, the better the plastic is distributed.” The brothers quickly had a clear image in mind. Delicate, round legs growing upwards, bending and branching into a ramified seat surface, meandering up and branching out again into back and armrests. When they first showed their sketchbook full of ideas to Vitra, the response was instantly enthusiastic.
Egon Bräuning, Head of Product Development found the idea “provocative and fresh”: “In the early developmental stage the two designers did not explore feasibility as much. You can tell that from the chair.” Just a few months after the first meeting the Bouroullecs constructed a 3D model of their chair vision: a chair had emerged that was completely asymmetrical, interwoven and grown, as if nature had been the constructor, which, even though this did not appear to be the case, could also be stacked. But it was precisely the technical feasibility which put clear limits on this initial design.
It soon became obvious that the veined and branching chair could never be die cast and ejected. Nor was there any way of calculating the stability of a completely asymmetrical seat. Nevertheless, the Bouroullec brothers did not let this hinder them, and neither did Egon Bräuning and Vitra Chairman, Rolf Fehlbaum. “At Vitra you feel like you are under a sort of protective cover,” says Ronan Bouroullec about their collaboration, and laughs. The brothers were to keep working on the project without paying attention to market constraints.
On the bottom floor of the three-story Paris office, where the furniture workshop is to be found, they now began to play around with graphic forms. On large sheets of paper the Bouroullecs drew different seat versions, varied the meshwork of the many small branches and compared them with other structures composed of fewer but wider branches. With every pattern they had to make sure they integrated a rectangle of stable supporting elements in the seat, one which visually disappeared in the structure. The seating shell also demanded a stable substructure which would not require too much material.
At one of the many regular meetings at Vitra a solution was found in the form of a T-profile. “The T-profile was primarily a rational decision,” admits Erwan Bouroullec, “but once we had found the solution things began to flow again.” However, when the first resin model was cast a nasty surprise awaited them. “We sat on the chair and realized that it was anything but comfortable,” recalls Erwan Bouroullec. The construction’s basic framework was finished but there was no end yet to the constant to-and-fro between ergonomics, design and technical feasibility. How could the seating shell be designed more ergonomically? Why did the seat look more like a perforated surface than branches that have grown together? The brothers made some crucial decisions. They reduced the number of branches, flattened them, thereby improving the ergonomics. To lend the seating shell a grown character the seat was divided into three levels and interwoven at the crossover points. The Bouroullecs cut up innumerable resin models and used modelling clay to arrange them in different forms. “We were constantly building models to help us understand why the chair was so clear in our minds and yet so awful in reality,” says Ronan Bouroullec.
The long overlooked problem of the legs finally came up. Vitra suggested that they cast the front legs together with the seating shell and keep the back legs separate, gluing them in later. The flow from legs to seating shell had to be worked on in great creative detail. And the hardest part of all was to calculate the dividing line of the two parts of the mould without creating a ridge. Egon Bräuning who has worked at Vitra for 45 years says “Vegetal was the most complicated project I have ever experienced.” We believe him.
This text was originally published in the magazine form.
Words: Miriam Irle
Photos: Courtesy of Bouroullec Studio
