LOUNGE LANDSCAPE Nicola Burggraf, Susanne Hoffmann, Steffen Reichert, Nico Reinhardt, Yanbo Xu, Department of Form Generation and Materialisation (Achim Menges), HfG, Offenbach, 2007 The Lounge Landscape was instigated by the university’s commission to design and manufacture seating furniture, for its 175th anniversary celebrations, reflecting the school’s design and prototyping expertise. In collaboration with the relevant manufacturing industry, the project began with the development of a novel composite material system consisting of a 3-D spacer textile sandwiched in a stressed glass-fibre skin. The nonelastic textile’s capacity to differentially stretch and contract through geometric deformation offers the possibility to articulate double-curved surfaces without the need for seams or cut patterns. This specific material behaviour was encoded in a customprogrammed analysis application linked with form-generation processes based on mathematical equations. This enabled a morphological evolution of iteratively testing and evaluating parametric variants of the mathematical definition based on the innate possibilities and constraints of the 3-D textile to form seamless double-curved surfaces. The resulting form was CNC manufactured as a mother mould, facilitating the production of a multitude of individual, geometrically different furniture morphologies all remaining material specific and stackable. More importantly, this integral approach to form, material, structure and manufacturing also provides an inroad for rethinking surface articulation as a means of differentiating possible body–surface interaction. Each Lounge Landscape furniture piece provides for a multitude of anticipated as well as divergent activities by up to seven people at a time. The openendedness of possible uses and loose-fit ergonomics, and the concurrent erosion of clearly demarcated functional zones of more conventional seating furniture, demands a conscious (re)positioning of the user within the landscapelike articulation and its microsocial context, prompting an intensified individual and collective experience.
The mother mould, from which all six geometrically variant individual surfaces were built, is CNC milled from highdensity polystyrene blocks, reinforced with glass-fibre mats and finished with glossy, jet-black paint in order to achieve the high-quality composite surface finish of the furniture pieces.
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