Shades of Michelangelo

The chair design fuses warm maple wood with a cold metal surface to create a simple form and an intriguing connection between natural and man-made materials.
The design comes from the question ‘what if the back plate is deformed according to one’s leaning on it backward?’
The back plate, the sheet and the partial front legs are made out of a single aluminum sheet with a thickness of 3mm, bended to the form. The partial front legs of the aluminum work not only for the design but also for structural strength, as there are no joints between the chair legs. The metal that has used for the seat and back plate of the chair harnesses new technology, which is more typically reserved for architectural façades, called ‘incremental forming’. It is a cutting edge technology and has been developed by a cooperative Japanese company, Kikukawa Kogyo Co., Ltd., is a dieless metalworking process that is suitable for small productions of a wide variety of products.