Guillermo Bernal is an architect, academic, designer and artist with an interest in reptile skin and fruit with tough skins. Skins have physical functional qualities, such as protection, and containment, but their aesthetic and textural qualities such as colour and roughness also have function essential to the animal or fruit such as enticing the the fruit to be eaten by some animals but not others.
This piece is an experiment in the exploration of the processes that might form such skins and how by manipulating them, the forms and sculptural qualities of familiar objects might be explored.
The premiss behind this chair design is that where a person will sit on the chair it must be smooth in order to be comfortable, but where an “external agent”, lets imagine your boss, would approach, the surface is rugged and defensive.
The textures were created by using a random noise algorithm that is allowed to modulate the form of a base CAD model. The model is then broken-up into pieces of a suitable size to be milled on a 3 axis CNC router. The use of three layers of birch ply as the material also gave an unpredicted but beautiful contour pattern adding both a layer of complexity to the finished surface, but also a pattern that can help to make sense of the form.
A thoroughly interesting piece.
Remember the
Noize chair?
