The Looper’s  aim is to create a recognizable and comfortable piece of furniture to be installed in Portland for the Street Seat 2018 challenge. We began our journey precisely considering the urban environment as a balanced set of physical and cultural elements, constructing a strong and stable “organism” driven by a sort of hidden fragility. Urban environment as a contradictory complexity. Strenght and flexibility are so the values conveyed into the design process. The proposal focuses on the use of a set of bands held together and compressed through the use of serie of tensioned wire ropes, system which allows to have a very stable and adaptable system.

Every rubber band is spaced through an element positioned in between. The wire rope acts as the joining element: it passes across bands and spacers and through tension it compresses the elements giving stability and strength to the bench. The pulling components are situated on a steel basement, element from which the entire system rely on and by which the bench can be fixed mechanically to the ground.
The composition it is built using few reference sections, with these lines is possible to control the overall shape of the bench. This first step is fundamental in order to manage the parameters which will help to keep all the bands to a constant distance between each other. In this way the structure has only two standard spacers, one type to build the straight sequences and one other used for the curvatures the object has on the seat and backrest.

The form-finding technique helped us to identify the right components to be used in order to design a stable and safe bench, a method by which through precise parameters previously set in relationship to the actual physical characteristics of the material, we were able to determine the composition and shape of the whole bench and all its components simultaneously.

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Design:

Cristian Li Voi & Nyxo Visionary Design

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Finalist Street Seats Iinternational competition 2018
Design Museum Portland

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