Clean Cut Chair

Sometimes a search for beauty drives design utility. Clean Cut is a perfect example. The market is full of shell chairs, too "contemporary" or retro in appearance, often made of wood composite or plastic. Practical, but not memorable. Turning to bent plywood allowed us to design a constantly curving, organic shape while keeping the profile thin and strong. It also made for a more responsive seat. From there, it became an exercise in subtle shape manipulation. Laying down curves with thin tape on a seating buck, we tested out silhouettes. We then converted our freehand shapes back into ones and zeros for the CAD file, which was a bit like reinventing fire, but led to something that expresses our refined, more comfortable, take on a much-loved classic—the modern utilitarian bent-ply chair.