Cool hunters who are down to earth enough to still look over their shoulder should flock to the Amsterdam Stedelijk museum to check out the world’s first ever 3D printed chair. The museum purchased this chair, named the Solid C2, which was produced almost ten years ago by French designer Patrick Jouin.
The chair is bright red and looks just like you would expect a printed chair to; plasticky. According to the stories circulating on the internet about this object, the technical specs of the seat are intriguing, as the construct hangs together from materials that are like intersecting fibrous ribbons. The material, according to Dezeen, an architecture and design blog, “ignored furniture-making traditions in favor of the freeform shapes that 3D printing allows”.
And perhaps that is something we should be happy about, because what would be the use of a new technology if it merely replicated existing materials and procedures? Jouin started experimenting with 3D print methods in 2004, when most of his peers only created very small items. Working with a company called .MGX, the French designer took the entire process to a whole new level, and managed to have the printer spew out forms and sizes that were once thought impossible to produce.
“The Solid chair was the first furniture piece made with the SLS [selective laser sintering] technique in one piece,” says the Stedelijk museum’s curator of industrial design Ingeborg de Roode. “It clearly shows the possibilities of this technique to make very complicated structures.”
Earlier, the museum purchased two One_Shot.MGX stools by Jouin from 2006. It also owns five Snotty Vases by Marcel Wanders, which are 3D printouts too, dating from 2001, as well as a Miss Piggy ring by Ted Noten, printed in 2009. The Stedelijk Museum is located in the centre of Amsterdam and you will be able to make your way by public transport easily from the location of any Amsterdam Apartment accommodation by taking tram line 5 or bus 170 and getting off at the Van Baerlestraat.
