The Glass Chair Competence Building for Innovation

This paper tells the strange tale of a glass chair. Creating a glass chair might seem a perverse – maybe impossible – enterprise. After all, chairs are normally held together by moment connections, such as those joining the legs to the seat. Glass is a notoriously bad material for forming moment connections; it is brittle, and quickly snaps if you subject it to bending. But there are advantages to such startling formulations of design problems. They force you to challenge conventional wisdom, to ignore standard prototypes, and to ask interesting new questions. How might you design a chair without moment connections? How might you do so without making the result impossibly heavy? How would you built it? And what interesting qualities might such a chair have? These were questions investigated in the design project pursued jointly by students at an American and a Portuguese school, in collaboration with glass and molding fabricators. The students explored many possibilities, and in doing so learned a great deal about chairs and about the properties and potentials of glass. The final project is a particularly elegant outcome of their investigations. It is created from just two curved pieces of glass, which held together by metal tie-rods. In the end, the finished glass chair looked just like the initial computer visualizations.