CHAIR EXPERIMENTS
the walking chair

date: 1992
collaboration with Michael Lam, Jason Jondreau and Nektarios Solakofski

Rather than extending the surface of the ground up to the body, as conventional chairs do, this extends the body to meet the ground with an extra pair of limbs. Their movement is mechanically coupled to the bending of the knees and moves with the user. When walking, the extra legs flail uselessly behind the back, mimicking the motion of the arms swinging to balance. The motion of sitting is as usual, with the new limbs designed to swing down to hit the ground just as the body loses its balance, and supporting the user in a stable and effortless pose.

This chair was designed in response to the themes of the Sight/Site Works conference in 1992. As for site, it has none. It crashed the 'standing-only' buffet on the conference final day.

geodesic chair

date: 1995
collaboration and concept by Aniko Meszaros

Doing away with the body entirely, as the contact surfaces are inaccessible, the structure of a typical desk chair extends outward in all directions. This is an exercise in the resolution of two very different geometries into one coherent structure. Twelve identical chair bases tile the surface of a sphere, corresponding to the faces of a regular dodecahedron. The discrepancy between their quadrilateral geometry and that of the pentagon results in a twist, and emergent geometries of cubes and tetrahedra.