Bram Geenen's Gaudi-stool weighs just one kilogram. The lightweight carbon fiber chair was created in the same way that Antoní Gaudi designed the structure of his churches, by making a model of hanging chains and letting gravity determine the strongest and most logical shape for withstanding forces...

Bram Geenen with the Gaudi-stool

From Bram Geenen:

The Gaudi-stool was part of the furnistructure project. In the Furnistructures project we researched how lightweight products can be designed. Lightness has a lot advantages, in the use of products and their impact on the environment. This has lead to research into structural systems, as found in nature and architecture, and the possibilities of designing lightweight furniture using such systems.

Materials & techniques: A thin shell made of carbon fiber deals with the compressive forces. A beam-grid substructure resists bending of the shell. The substructure was made using rapid-prototyping techniques, in order to achieve the needed complexity. The rapid-prototyped structure was then used as a mold for the carbon-fiber laminates. This combining of these two high-tech techniques decreased costs of both of them, and made them applicable in a product.

The project includes a series of designs for furniture. Of these unrealized designs, the Gaudi-chair is currently being developed in cooperation with Dutch research institute TNO.

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