a sit of faith

There is a drawing in a sketch books from my last semester of architecture school which has been haunting me over the years. It is a sketch of a chair partly inspired by a conceptual staircase made by one of my professors and partly inspired by my fascination at the time with the mechanics/objects of sailing. I thought about the trapeze acts of sailing, the acts of faith and trust of life in the equipment.
I thought about how the sail was activated by and took its form from the presence of a wind.
I thought about how a chair could be activated by and take its form from the presence of a body.
I wanted to make a chair that needed the presence of a body to fully realize its chair-ness...

I left the chair totally undeveloped and moved onto another idea about a hypergeneric workstation (a story for another time). I was able to take the opportunity to make the chair for my first project here at Cranbrook.

The assignment: make that thing you've never made.

It is sited in the stairwell; it relies directly on the architecture.

Wall brackets and runners with teflon bearings

Back side of wall brackets. Wood brackets with ball bearings.

Left side of assembled chair.

It functions as a chair in the sense that one can sit in it, however it still needs a bit of tuning in order to fulfill the ideas suggested by the original sketch...