Quick, think of a famous lounge chair.
What did you picture? The Barcelona, the Eames, the Egg, the Wegner Shell? Chances are it contains foam.
If you want to name a famous lounge chair design without foam, you practically have to go back to 1925, to Breuer’s Wassily.
Now, 100 years later, perhaps we’re ready for another. Swedish industrial designer Jonas Forman has designed this O2 Lounge Chair for Hay. Forman, who favors using a minimum of materials, challenged himself to design a comfortable lounge chair that relies not on foam, but on clever use of materials. A carefully-designed fabric shell is pulled taut over a tubular steel frame, “forming a voluminous shape that adapts to the user’s posture while providing firm support.”
In this brief chat Forman discusses his material-driven approach to design, where he studies the behavior and properties of a material before he determines the form: