rotating zero.gravity chair draws on iconic modernist furniture for a mobile workspace

zero.gravity: a mobile office and chair by an.onymous 

A sequence of spatial circumstances inscribed with a meandering interior and a circular exterior, ZERO.GRAVITY is a modular chair conceived by AN.ONYMOUS to offer mobile working solutions and extend work out of the typical office environment. The piece aims to encourage new forms of collaboration and interaction with, and within, the outside environment to foster productivity in new ways.

Drawing on the forms, geometries and aesthetics of four classic modernist chairs, including Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand’s iconic LC4 Chaise Longue, the furniture piece integrates four options for seating enclosed within a rotating tubular steel loop. Users can sit on any of the four prescribed chairs simply by rolling the piece on the ground, or appropriate the interstitial areas to find their own comfort zones, take new positions, and adopt unscripted postures. 

a rotating amalgam of iconic modernist furniture

More than just a chair, ZERO.GRAVITY is an amalgam of four of the most iconic furniture pieces from the modernist era traced along a continuous loop. AN.ONYMOUS integrates the classic tubular steel minimalist characteristics of Marcel Breuer’s Wassily Chair, Mies van der Rohe’s MR Chair, Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand’s LC4 Chaise Longue, and Herbert Everest and Henry Jennings’ first Folding Wheel Chair. The seating positions are formed by continuous sweeps of tubular steel which ripple to form the contours that accommodate the human body, cradled within a larger looping tube which forms the rotating border.

With no fixed orientation or position, the ever-moving object — a cycle of human habitation — only finds stability and balance when occupied. The human body is its center of gravity, completing the ‘void’ with its presence. ‘But to inhabit the piece, one also has to tame it: a dynamic dance of the two in search for composure. Motion here is the prerequisite for repose and rest. The labor of this intimate interplay is the power that animates the machine,’ comments the team at AN.ONYMOUS.

The human body is the essential component of ZERO.GRAVITY, long conceived within the ideological and geometric constraints of architecture. From the Vitruvian Man drawn within the idealized outlines of a circle and a square — reconciling the formal and functional orders of Renaissance humanism, to the Corbusian Modulor conceived from the standards of measure in the twentieth-century modernism. ‘Here, the divine circle has been reduced to a skeletal structure, and the square a convoluted vestige of its modern past,’

project info:

name: ZERO.GRAVITY
designer: AN.ONYMOUS 
design team: Iman Ansari, Marta Nowak

collaborator: UCLA CityLAB

client: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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