In the Details: The Polypropylene-and-Leather Seat Shell of Stefan Diez’s Tune Chair
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Photos © Jonathan Mauloubier (left) and Mario Gastinger
In the Details is our weekly look at one especially smart, innovative or unusual detail of a new design.
The German designer Stefan Diez has been working on the same chair, more or less, for seven years. His latest version, called Tune, was released this summer as a part of the exhibition Seven Studies, held at a furniture showroom in Munich. Compared to the first version of the chair, Tune is a little brighter and a little more bespoke. But the skeleton is the same. In fact, it’s those bones that gave the original chair its name.
Chassis was developed for the residential and office furniture company Wilkhahn starting in 2006. (It didn’t reach consumers until 2011.) “They have quite a reputation, and I was quite ambitious about trying something new,” says Diez. He aimed to build the chair from strong sheet-metal parts, and then wondered: Why couldn’t the manufacturing process match the materials? Diez consulted with automobile suppliers based in Germany and the Netherlands about using a modern car-manufacturing method for his chairs. They decided on space-frame technology, where 300 tons of pressure deep-draws a fine steel sheet used for the frame.
Diez (center) with prototypes of his new Tune chair, which is a reworking of his earlier Chassis design
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