In 2012, renowned Spanish industrial designer Andre Ricard, published Casos de Diseño. A book where illustrious designers expose the process that led them to produce some of their most iconic designs. The whole process breakdown is shown along with the decisions made, and the stages for achieving the final result. A reconsideration of the creative process that can only be done by those who have lived it.

The W.01 also known as Shell was born as an experimental project under the name of Workstation and its first presentation took place in an exhibition of the same name during Experiment Design 2009. This project had the purpose of experimenting around chairs or other objects conceived for sitting, using plywood as the main material and its transformation by CNC cutting for subsequent manual assembly.

As plywood is a widely used material in furniture design its choice for this project was based mainly on the rationality of its use, its sustainability component and the structural flexibility it allows. At the origin of this project is also the ease of use by CNC milling cutters by a small factory in Sintra, with whom Marco developed some projects.

Despite the fact that the possibility of molding and shaping the wood sheets by means of molds and gluing would be the most obvious attack, the first sketches of the W01 led to its utilisation in "cold", without resorting to the usual molded layers characteristic in the rational use of this material.

INFLUENCES

W.01 is a cross between plastic and historical references. On the one hand, from a plastic and formal point of view, the W.01 evokes the natural shape of a biological structure that recalls the geometric shape of the spiral or the structure of a mealy bug. On the other hand, its arms refer to the Indo-Portuguese chair, whose main characteristic resides in arms so long that they serve to extend the legs.

TECHNOLOGY

Produced in plywood, the W.01 chair is made up of pieces cut out in CNC from Bétula plywood plates from the Finnish brand Wisa. The pieces are joined by gluing, then preceded by a manual preparation of each piece and finally by roughing and cleaning the contact and bonding areas. This gluing is carried out using traditional joinery assembly techniques that use the clamps to compress the pieces to be joined and let them dry under that pressure.

STRUCTURE

The chair is made up of vertebrae and spine, distributing forces and weights between them. Its structure appears to be that of a shell, the vertebral column of which is supported by transverse supports joined at the end by the arms.

DEVELOPMENT AND MODIFICATIONS

From the ergonomic point of view, the W.01 is a structural container on which several juxtaposed pads are fastened by clips. These pads are like segments or sections that stand between the user's body and the container of the chair, as they conform and adjust when sitting. The user can also add pads depending on their needs.

PRODUCTION AND MARKETING

W.01 is edited and marketed by Branca-Lisboa. It all started in 2009, at the Castro cabinetmaker, with the development and production of this chair. Today Branca-Lisboa works with several producers and manufacturers of other technologies in the north of Portugal, but maintains the Castro cabinetmaker as the main factory and supplier of the plywood products.

The W.01 has a singular identity, displayed in the discrete beauty of plywood in a shell like form.

Publication: first published in Casos de Diseño, 2012

Author: Andre Ricard Sala