Vegetal Chair

The "Vegetal Chair" is designers and brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec's solution to the problem of creating a lightweight, durable, stackable chair for outdoor use that was inspired by nature and manufactured industrially.

The Bouroullecs and the manufacturer, Vitra, knew that the chair's functional criteria meant that it would need to be injection-molded in plastic. In this process, hot, liquid plastic is injected into a mold at high pressure and must flow evenly into all parts of the mold before it cools, solidifies, and is removed, all in less than two minutes.

The Bouroullecs worked with Vitra for nearly four years to develop their ideas based on growth patterns in nature into a design suited to infection-molding.

Their process was at once artisanal and high-tech, involving handmade drawings and hand-carved scale models, but also virtual modeling software and CAD-produced prototypes. The final product features asymmetrical, geometric, branching openwork to an elegant, versatile chair.