64, Greek Chair

The Greek chair is a traditional chair that we can find in most restaurant, bars, cafés and along the beach in Greece. Made of wood, the Greek chair is very robust and is designed to resist chocks and messy storage. Bartenders, clients and tourists manipulate this chair without any care (it is not rare to see one being thrown away to make space). This chair is also considered as an archetype to the Lambda chair with its rudimentary design. With this first picture I started working on a few sketches. I used them to combine the aesthetic of the Greek alphabet with the Greek chair. Although it was more a creative research on style, it was useful to immerge myself into the cultural context of this object. (see the three images below)

The assembly system participates to the aesthetic of the chair: it is the artisanal trademark, the symbol that holds all the different pieces of the chair together. It is a practical and symbolic design. Placed in angle and build by mortise and tenon, the system does not require any glue, and all the different parts can be disassembled if one is broken and needs to be rebuilt. If one piece is broken, you can preserve the whole chair by replacing the single broken piece instead of throwing it away. The materials used are: wood for the main structure of the chair (for this chair I used beech but it can also be made in oak) and textile for the seat (“Tricotin”, spool knitting of cotton and nylon).

“Tricotin” of nylon and coton Tricotin of nylon and cotton is a work that I did with the help of a textile designer, Nicolas Stolarczyk. This fabric is designed to be very resistant and using a tu - bular structure. Besides, there is a lot of space between the fibres. The economy of matter was important to this project, thus I preferred to work with new and innova - tive structures saving matter and increasing resistance. For instance, the seat can be replaced just as any other piece of the chair. It can be replaced for various reasons: a new trend, the consumer’s taste, or if the seat is simply broken. In other words, the seat can easily be replaced thanks to the assembly system. 64 refers to the length in meters of nylon thread which represents a real textile economy. This can be made manually as well as industrially. Moreover, nylon is a material that takes part in the recycling loop: if the fab - ric is broken, the nylon can still be recycled and re-used for other purposes (like t-shirt manufactures).