Flat Pack Chair, SALON at Radius House, Venice, Los Angeles
A dining chair made for an exhibition in Los Angeles, built from half a sheet of plywood to travel as hand luggage.
Made for SALON, a temporary exhibition staged inside Radius House in Venice, Los Angeles, curated by Noemi Polo and presenting work by around fifty international artists and designers. Radius House was the first ground-up residential project by Pentagon, the Los Angeles practice Paul Trussler co-founded, and was built without a client as a testing ground for the practice’s own ideas, then opened for art and design shows ahead of its sale. It was published in Wallpaper*, Dezeen and designboom. Studio Goons was invited to contribute a piece to the exhibition.
The constraint was travel from Paris to Los Angeles. The chair had to fit inside a flat pack box, fly as a carry-on, and be assembled on arrival without complicated tools. That one restriction produced the entire design. Working from half a single sheet of birch plywood meant the whole chair had to be resolved in two dimensions before it existed in three. Every component had to nest, every angle had to be cuttable, and the assembly sequence had to be clear. It arrived as a set of flat components and left the box as a chair, with no visible fasteners.
