My junior year, I took an independent study in drawing and design. Although I initially worked exclusively on 2D designs, a few weeks into the semester, my advisor suggested I focus my energies on designing and building something tangible, instead of just making drawings. I chose to make a chair

Initially, I wanted to use sandwiched corrugated cardboard as a building material. I liked the idea behind Frank Gehry's cardboard furniture and hoped that I could make something both cheap and sturdy. I had read that blocks of corrugated cardboard could hold up to surprising compressive forces if the layers were stacked such that the "grain" of the corrugation in adjacent layers was perpendicularly oriented. I sketched an outline of a shape, transferred that shape to Adobe Illustrator (for easy scaling), and printed it out. I then traced the shape onto many recycled boxes, cut them out with an Xacto blade, and assembled a maquette with hot glue.

At my professor's suggestion, I decided to build the full-sized chair in plywood instead of cardboard to enhance its durability. To save on weight, I chose to modify the design: instead of a solid laminate, there would be spacers between the chair outline segments and filling in the seat area.

I printed out the outline segments at 1:1 scale on a poster printer and traced them onto large sheets of plywood. I roughed out the sections with a reciprocating saw, and then made closer cuts with a bandsaw. Once I had all the parts cut out, I glued them together with wood glue, clamping them in sections of 3-4 pieces before combining them into larger units.

After the body of the chair was complete, I sanded down the outer edges of slats to even out irregularities and improve the tactility of the wood.