PANE chair – Baking A Bread Chair

The concept of this chair evolved from an article that I had read in the National Geographic.  The article in the prestigious American magazine mentioned fibers that are blown out like a spider’s web, and optical fibers, and spoke about the future of miraculous fibers from a scientific and technological angle.  The moment I had set my eyes on the article, I had a firm vision of the future in my head.

My idea of a structure of the future was, against common belief, not to secure strength using hard materials, but to systematically organize small fibers so as to gain strength by spreading the stress.

I wondered if I could create an entirely new type of chair in which the fiber itself is the structural body and which feels like sitting on air.  After a good many trials and errors, I thought of a chair which finish is uncertain until it has been baked in a kiln and of its making process, and named it after a food that everybody in the world is familiar with.  That is the “PANE chair” (pane means bread in Italian).

The PANE chair goes through almost the same steps as baking bread. A semi-cylindrical block of fibers is rolled, inserted into a paper tube, and by baking it in a kiln at 104 ℃, the fibers memorize the shape of the chair. It is way beyond the conventional methods of making a chair; it is a bread-like chair.