Designed by the New York based architects and designers Caterina Tiazzoldi and Eduardo Benamor Duarte (team Tania Branquinho and Mauro Fassino) in collaboration with (PASTOFO and POLITROFA), is an adaptable chair for hotel lobbies, restaurants and airports waiting areas.
Inspired from the fractal growth of a shell, Throw Felt Along Curve is realized in felt an fiber glass.
Its design has been generated with a parametric logic (deriving from a Grasshopper application) that allows to reconfigure in accord with the location and user's inputs.
The prototype of the configuration Porcupine has been expressly designed for the reception space of the Altis Hotel in Lisbon. The installation emphasizes the question of the relation existing between the proliferation of abstract geometrical configurations and their becoming object or space trough material implementation.
It engages the difference between an iteration based on an abstract geometrical model that can be downloaded and repeated in any part of the globe, and the resistance of the specificity of material materiality to such a temporal contraction.
By glimpsing to the typical Rhino tool Throw Curve along Curve, Porcupine transforms abstraction into design.
Porcupine is realized with 40 sheets of felt realized by Pastofo, supported by a fiber glass skeleton realized by POLITROFA.
The sheets's height varies from 68 to 30 cm while their spacing shifts according to the pressure of the body's weight or the proximity of a group of sheets.
The design for the porcupine seat is processed through the iteration and transformation of a same component.
In response the warmth and malleability of the felt produces a non-woven cloth that is produced by matting, condensing and pressing fibers. These fibers are produced by recycled residual waste processed in a sustainable manner into felt.
The selection of the material become the unique condition to actualize geometry: It is by throwing felt, and not wood or steel, that the porcupine becomes a piece of design.
What previously was an abstract procedure acquires the capacity to change the matter's performance.
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