Although we’ve seen much exploration into formed furniture made of concrete, we’ve yet to happen upon a way to make this hardest of man-made materials into something soft and luxurious—an incarnation which might be appropriate for, say, a curvaceous upholstered chair. Danish architect Anne-Mette Manelius aims to change all that: her Fabric Formed Concrete Chair challenges the senses, while redefining our long-held perceptions of concrete.

Concrete Chair. Designed by Anne-Mette Manelius.

A “Soft” Chair Constructed of Concrete

Of course, anybody who has ever worked with concrete knows that it can never actually be soft. The stuff exists because of its intractable resistance to compressive forces. But that hasn’t prevented Manelius from creating a concrete chair that duplicates the look of the softest of fabrics.

For Manelius, the Fabric Formed Chair is an exercise in exploring the interplay between the senses. She revels in the different interpretations between sight and touch. Thus, since “fabric, patterned surface structure and a bulging surface are all associated with the notion of an upholstered chair,” the Fabric Formed Chair looks as if it were upholstered and luxuriously soft, but is in fact as hard as any angular concrete bench.

To the removed observer, then, (and even under intense scrutiny—notice the fine “capitonne” details and “fabric” striations), the chair appears round, bulging… so very soft. But once the tactile sense is engaged, the gap between expectation and reality opens wide, creating a jarring effect that’s as unsettling as it is exciting: “I looked at the chair and in my head I knew it was concrete and couldn’t understand that it wasn’t fabric. Then when I sat on it, in my head I knew it would be hard but I was still surprised to find that the chair wasn’t as soft as it looked.”

Via ChairBlog.

About the Designer: Anne-Mette Manelius is an architect in Copenhagen, Denmark. She’s also an industrial PhD student working on “the architectural perspectives for fabric formed concrete in an industrialized context.” In layman’s terms, she’s fascinated by the potential to develop new architectural forms from traditional building materials. Her Fabric Formed Concrete Chair is an intriguing example of how a hard material like concrete can take on the curvaceous, bulging, and ostensibly soft form of a luxurious upholstered chair.