📔 Competition Brief

Premise

Architecture is about designing experiences. Starchitects go to great lengths to curate an amazing experience for their users. This obviously includes the walls, roof and floors, but often also extends to designing other details like paintings, lights and furniture. A detail that many starchitects find important is the chair.

As long as architects have been designing buildings, they’ve also been designing the chairs that feature within them. Starchitects like Frank Gehry, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Zaha Hadid and Eero Saarinen, have all designed iconic chairs. In order to have complete control over how users experience their buildings, they have masterfully crafted chairs that complement their design language.

Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “… it is quite impossible to consider the building as one thing, its furnishings another…”. While architecture sets the scene and provides the framework, a chair can have a strong influence on a room’s character. The Barcelona Pavilion is incomplete without the Barcelona Chair and so is the Villa Savoye without the LC4 Chaise Lounge.

The Starchitect’s Chair design competition is looking for the next iconic chair.

Design Synopsis

Through training and experience, architects acquire a wide range of skills that enable them to design at any scale – from urban to product design. Designing a chair requires a deep understanding of the scale and dimensions of the human body.

Imagine yourself as the next starchitect. Your buildings would need an iconic chair to accompany them. The chair needs to be more than a place to sit on. It needs to be a work of art!

Design a chair that immerses the user in your design philosophy. The chair needs to take into consideration multiple aspects – aesthetics, materials, fabrication, and – most importantly – comfort. You can design any kind of chair – office chair, lounge chair, outdoor chair or something unique!

Can you design the next iconic chair?