Legend of Iron Spine is a one-of-a-kind, handmade, dynamic seating solution crafted from steel cable and hand-dressed elm. Taking inspiration from the popular exercise ball office chair, Legend of Iron Spine was designed to improve posture by promoting an active core through instability.
Rather than using pen-and-paper sketches, I built physical sketch models to quickly explore different combinations of materials and ways of achieving dynamic support for the application.
Once a direction was selected, I set to work sourcing materials and building the full-scale version. Through trial and error I was able to determine how many steel-cable struts would be needed to support a 200+ pound load.
I selected minimal, press-fit hardware that would hold the members in place securely but unobtrusively, and left the elm -- sourced from the forests around my family home in New Hampshire -- in its raw form to preserve its natural beauty and contrast the industrial aesthetic of the braided steel cable.
