Written on September 26, 2008 – 4:49 pm | by Maria Mihale |


Pay attention when staring at this chair and try to guess what this piece of furniture is made of. I could bet all my money on the fact that most of the people will think of LEGO, and with good reason, as a matter of fact. It looks like the interlocking plastic bricks assembled in the form of a futuristic chair, but we’re far from the truth.



Designer Matthew Plummer Fernandez chose to take design cues from the most unusual “place” ever, rather than inspiring himself from nature, architecture or any other traditional aesthetic sources. The angular contours of the so-called Sound/Chair are the consequence of a mapping sound waves experience. In other words, the result is an exact replica of a sound wave graph and embodies two different entities: a sound and a chair.

The product begins as a sound that is precisely crafted to imitate the shape of a chair when visualized as a 3-dimensional object using a volume, time and frequency plot. Made of polyethylene foam, water-jet cut (the first prototype was hand-cut expanded polystyrene), this chair is the first step to a project aiming at exploring the translation of furniture into sound and vice versa. If the sound can be visualized as a 3-dimensional object as long as it’s graphed mathematically, its “image” is brought to light: a landscape of spikes and shapes that vary accordingly to the type of sound. Altering those three parameters (volume, length and frequency) we’re facing a sound wave in the shape of a chair, which inherited the aesthetic of the specific sound.



After trying 719 different sounds, the designer put the chair into production. The Sound/Chair was launched at Selfridges’s pop-up shop as part of London’s design week and can be bought for an incredible amount of £3950 ($7280). This is one hell of an expensive chair, for god’s sake!

(Source Dvice)