Hasta La Ideas

The Thonet Chair showed what you could do with bentwood rods; Le Corbusier’s LC3 showed what could be made with bent metal tubes; the Eameses demonstrated what could be done with bent plywood. Now five designers are showing us the types of furniture that can be produced using this generation’s new production method, 3D printing.

Stereolithography printing services company i.materialise is featuring five full-sized furniture pieces on their blog, like Bram Geenen’s Gaudi stool (above) and Patrick Jouin’s Solid C1 chair (below). Jouin explained his discovery of stereolithography in Laurel Saville’s “Design Secrets: Furniture” book as follows:

When you design an object… you will always have someone else who will come in the process and say, ‘Sorry Patrick, you can’t do it like this because our machine won’t do this.’ So I change it. I don’t want to, but I have to find a solution. Or the manufacturer will say, ‘I can’t sell this, the market will not accept.’ But this time, there is no technical constraint, and no one in the middle of the process. It’s now a pure idea; not cooked, but raw. Which is why it looks so incredible.

Check out the rest of the printed pieces here.

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