Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec spent four years working on a chair whose structure is derived from the growth of plants.

Here is an excerpt of the article on vitra's homepage - please check for the link below!

Can you plant a chair? You can. In 19th century North America young trees were shaped over the course of several years until they adopted the contours of a chair. Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec were so fascinated by this traditional technique that they came up with the idea of designing a “grown chair.” What has to grow needs time, and as such Vegetal was created in an unusually long design process. Now, four years after the first idea emerged, the chair of fibre-reinforced polyamide is about to be presented. Flat branches extend and interweave into an asymmetrical, irregular circle-shaped seating shell. The woven strips are stabilized by ribs which grow downwards and merge with the legs. Viewed from the rear, Vegetal looks like a leaf with several stalks and numerous veins branching off.

“As designers, it is our task to find new structures, new construction forms,” explains Ronan Bouroullec with regard to his work: “And this chair is primarily structure and not just a motif.” But how come Vegetal appears to be anything but an assembled construction, more like a single cast?

A second inspiring idea which was the result of the Bouroullecs’ intensive work with die casting mingled with the initial idea of the grown chair. “In the die casting process plastic shoots into the form like blood into veins,” says Ronan, “and the finer and more branched the form is, the better the plastic is distributed.”

The brothers quickly had a clear image in mind. Delicate, round legs growing upwards, bending and branching into a ramified seat surface, meandering up and branching out again into back and armrests.It soon became obvious however that the veined and branching chair could never be die cast and ejected. Nor was there any way of calculating the stability of a completely asymmetrical seat.

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Vegetal Chair from Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec on Vimeo.

Please see the original article at vitra's new online magazine:

The text was originally published in magazine form.

Words: Miriam Irle

Photos: Courtesy of Bouroullec Studio