This week’s selection is the Voxel Chair V1.0 by Nagami Design.
Nagami Design is a Spanish design brand that focuses on using advanced technology to bring forward new ideas in furniture and environmental design. They explain:
“We bring 3D printing and robotic manufacturing to large scale products and objects with a wide range of customization possibilities. Research and innovation are at the core of our products, developed in collaboration with internationally renowned designers, who can challenge our technology to create groundbreaking products. We craft every detail, from the early conception of a product, to the software that allows it to come to life, exploring new ways of creating furniture and environments which push the limits of imagination to unseen territories.”
The company has undertaken a number of spectacular 3D printing projects, as you’ll certainly see on their extensive website, but we chose one in particular to focus on: the Voxel Chair V1.0. Be sure to explore their other projects, which are equally amazing.
This item, designed by Nagami Design’s Manuel Jiménez García and Gilles Retsin, is a fully functional, life size chair. But its sparse design is quite unique.
The chair is entirely 3D printed by a custom designed robotic 3D printer that can move in a non-planar fashion, as you can see in their video:
Nagami Design did state that the chair required a “2.4km continuous line of plastic”, demonstrating the incredible density of the internal structure of this piece.
The design of the Voxel Chair V1.0 is incredibly complex and had to be done using advanced software. Nagami Design does not specifically say what software was used, but they do say this:
“The Voxel Chair was developed for the exhibition ‘Imprimer Le Monde’ at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The software is based on research lead by Manuel Jimenez Garcia and Gilles Retsin at the Bartlett School of Architecture, Design Computation Lab.”
This makes sense, as having proprietary design software is precisely what differentiates one design firm from another. Nagami can use this software to design many types of unusual objects for their portfolio.
While the chair is quite airy in form, it also must serve as a functioning chair and support a sitting individual. The general structure of the chair would seem insufficiently strong to do so, but if you look closely in this rear image you can see that the structure is beefed up along the center axis.
I am continually amazed by the creativity of design firms as they explore the possibilities enabled by 3D printing.
Via Nagami Design
