Neri puts her feet up after designing the Gemini Alpha chair
Having recently moved home, from one grim hovel to another, purchasing furniture has been top of the bill*, and with so much to choose from in the DFS catalogue, it’s hard to find something eye-catching.
So it’s nice to see pint-sized professor, designer, artist, architect and all round tech ambassador Neri Oxman having a crack at a two-part chaise lounge – the Gemini Alpha – using some exciting colour 3D printing technology from Stratasys.
“Conveying the relationship of twins in the womb through material properties and their spatial arrangement,” wafts the press release, and there’s some interesting uses of material thrown in for good measure.
A solid wood shell provides the exterior, but the lining of the inside is built from 44 composite PolyJet digital materials, including the most recent colour additions to the range.
A close up of the chair’s 3D printed skin
The 3D printed ‘skin’ combines three base materials: Stratasys’ rubber-like TangoPlus, rigid VeroYellow and VeroMagenta, forming varying shades of transparent and opaque yellows and oranges, in different rigidities – like a close up view of someone’s tongue after eating a bag of Fruit Salads.
The materials, shapes and surfaces of the 3D printed skin apparently enable a “unique vibrational acoustic effect” for a quiet calming environment.
“Gemini is fundamentally about the complex and contradictory relationship between twins, which is mirrored in the geometrical forms of the two-part chaise and the dualities that drive their formation, such as the combination of natural and synthetic materials,” explains Neri, reclining in the seat to eat a bag of Quavers and watch a catch-up episode of Coronation Street.
“The Objet500 Connex3 Colour Multi-material 3D Printer and technology enabled us to print 44 material combinations that not only target specific pressure points on the body to form a sensorial landscape, but also act as a soundproof anechoic chamber, an architecture for quieting the mind.”
Gemini Alpha will be on display at Le Laboratoire, Paris from 28 March 2014, DFS have not announced any plans as of yet to stock it.
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*Next to removing the previous occupant’s bulk collection of used syringes and corralling the vermin population into a flock I can then sell to my local Peruvian restaurant.
