“I was asked to design an outdoor office, instead of building it out of new materials, I dug it out of the ground instead. ”
Three Black and White photos on top of one another. The first one is of some twigs with a hole opening to the sky. The second picture is a minimalist style building in a field. The third image says, this is Vitra.

How to Grow a Chair

Intro

Project Partner Vitra Design Museum

My Role Concept Development

Brief/Objective As part of the Vitra Design Museum Fellowship in 2010, I participated in a project called ‘The Outdoor Office’ at the Domaine de Boisbuchet in the south of France. In this workshop, we were asked to invent interesting solutions that would help facilitate working outside.

Location Domaine de Boisbuchet

Process

A grid with black and white pictures showing progression. First six pictures is a thirty-year-old woman digging a hole in a field. The hole begins to resemble the qualities of a chair. The last three pictures are two people sitting on the said chair

I took a slightly different course than was expected. This idea was being explored for the enjoyment that could be held from being outdoors, but it was suggested that this would be a more sustainable way to work because of lower electricity and infrastructure needs.

To inform my project, I used the metaphor of Biomimicry and imagined how the local wildlife might create habit. I refused offers of outsourced materials and instead like most of the natural world I foraged around the estate and used what I had. 

Eventually I decided to find a hill, and simply hollow out a chair. I shaped it in the form of the most famous office chair of all ‘the Eames’ and filled it with moss for comfort.

I even watered it to make sure the grass and moss would grow nicely after I left. Strangely the chair was functional, comfortable, easy to produce without any access materials and thus more sustainable than the other projects. Instead of bringing materials in, I simply took things away and moved them about. Yet, at the same time it was expressive. It conveyed a statement on the absurdity of the modern world with our addiction to gadgets, gizmos and ‘work’.

For the full written account, please go to:
How to grow a chair

A man sitting in a hole in the ground, happily working on a laptop.
A man's camera shot from behind. We can only see the back of his head. He is sitting in a field and looks comfortable. There is a mound of grass behind him.