Flow

Flow was my final project for ME263: The Chair at Stanford. The class is a 10 week exercise in patience and perseverance where students are plunged into the intricacies of good chair design within the context of history, material selection, and of course, user comfort. By the class’s end, students are expected to produce a single highly refined chair that showcases the sum of their accrued knowledge. My design, entitled “Flow,” is meant to be a marriage between a naturalistic ideal and a modern eye for design. The contours and swoops of this chair represent the common ground that is found in both nature’s running waterways and modern design’s love of sleek, flowing curves. I wanted this chair to beckon you with the same inevitability that a waterfall does when a rock caught in its swell meets the edge: you fall in and let it take you somewhere.

The legs of the chair were originally designed to be made out of steam bent red oak. I built my own steam bending box/assembly over the course of a few weeks, in addition to a “buck” that served as the mold to which the legs would be bent. The main body of the chair was to be crafted through laminated plywood veneers, capping with a double face veneer layer of bubinga and curly white maple, similarly made through molding to a buck. Unfortunately, the final few weeks of the class coincided with the beginning of the shelter in place order in California, preventing me from finishing the chair in the way that I wanted to for over a year, leaving this project as something of a white whale for me to finish.

After finally getting a chance to finish tackling the project in spring of 2021, I was able to complete the plywood lamination of my chair, though logistical issues prevented me from steam bending the legs, and other unexpected problems forced me to make heavy modifications to other components. After pivoting to plywood legs and making other tweaks as needed, I was finally able to catch my white whale the day before I graduated from my master’s program. I can proudly say that the chair now rests in my home; while the design isn’t exactly what I wanted it to be, it remains a testament to perseverance despite the odds, and I am beyond proud of the final product-especially when I drink my morning coffee in it.