Saturday, August 7, 2010

Try Eero's ball chair and get lost




Get lost in your own world inside the ball... like me. The Eero Aarnio's Ball Chair (1966) is a "room within a room" with a cozy and calm athmosphere, protecting outside noises and giving a private cocoon like space for relaxing. Turning around its own axis on the base the view to the outer world is on demand. 


Finnish designer Eero Aarnio ( born in 1932) is known primarily for two things: his light and very unconventional furnishings and his extensive use of fiberglass in his designs. Visit his website at eero-aarnio.com



Aarnio explains that "The idea of the chair was very obvious. We had moved to our first home and I had started my free-lance career in 1962. We had a home but no proper big chair, so I decided to make one, but some way a really new one. After some drawing I noticed that the shape of the chair had become so simple that it was merely a ball. I pinned the full scale drawing on the wall and ‚sat' in the chair to see how my head would move when sitting inside it. Being the taller one of us I ‚sat' in the chair and my wife drew the course of my head on the wall. This is how I determined the height of the chair. Since I aimed at a ball shape, the other lines were easy to draw, just remembering that the chair would have to fit through a doorway.


After this I made the first prototype myself using an inside mould, which has been made using the same principle as a glider fuselage or wing. I covered the plywood body mould with wet paper and laminated the surface with fiberglass, rubbed down the outside, removed the mould from inside, had it upholstered and added the leg. In the end I installed the red telephone on the inside wall of the chair. The naming part of the chair was easy, the BALL CHAIR was born."


Image from desire to inspire

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