Growing Chair: From the Forest to Your Living Room

Instead of cutting trees down to create chairs, why not create chairs made from living trees? That’s the idea behind the ‘Growing Chair’, an attempt to make trees and plants grow into chairs that can be harvested and brought straight from the ‘field’ to your living room.

Designer Michael Bussein describes his vision:

The Nature Manifesto

Having evolved from nature, we have gradually differentiated ourselves from it. Modern society has come to build itself on the perception that nature and man are separated. This differentiation has come to inhibit us and our way of creating. We have now reached the point when the way forward is going back.

We have to accept that we and everything we create are part of nature.

This mindset is essential for evolution as a whole. When applying this to our way of thinking we will liberate ourselves from stagnated conventions.

To move further we need to incorporate the living matter that surrounds us. Let us use the complexity of living nature and include it in our creations. These creations will then redefine the way we reconstruct nature. Only then will we truly move forward.

It is time for man and nature to reunite.

Fast-growing willow trees and a Russian vine are planted together and grown in a chair-shaped ‘greenhouse’ that trains them to retain the shape of a chair. Once the plants have grown strong, the greenhouse is removed and the chair is cut from its roots.

It would be interesting to see what the chair looks like once the greenery, including the vines holding the willow trees together, would look like once it died. It seems that keeping the trees and vines rooted in soil would make for a prettier final product. But, it’s a fascinating idea all the same!

Link [Erik Sjödin] via [Ecofriend]

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