The straight line is the shortest path between two points, but it rarely is the most interesting. The Loop chair from Markus Johansson is inspired on the digressions of the mind.
It is the result of wandering around the thought of a chair, and it is built by the physical wanderings of the material itself, almost as if it were a sketch. This abstract and symbolic approach adds values such as expressiveness, dynamism, fun and fantasy to the piece, deriving in a light-hearted and suggestive chair.
The chair plays with its soft toy-like appearance, but is indeed a very functional chair: stackable, comfortable, long-lasting, resistant to exterior weather conditions and easy to clean, all of which makes it suitable for numerous different scenes for both interior and exterior environments.
The Loop chair is an experimental project aiming to explore new ways of working for us and to let us get in touch with new materials and methods in order to create an unconventionally shaped chair. In particular, the final purpose of this project was to gain more knowledge about fiberglass and the capacity of this fiber reinforced plastic to be readily molded into complex shapes.
Fiberglass, combined with 3D printing technology, can enable the developing of strong lightweight complex prototypes that can be transferred to production afterwards by means of a wide variety of technologies. In order to complete our purpose of creating a series of prototype chairs in fiberglass, a 1:1 scale model of the chair was 3D printed. This 1:1 model was then used to produce a silicon and fiberglass mould out of its shape. The final prototype was obtained by putting together the two sides of the cast, therefore building a hollow 3D fiberglass structure.
