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2010 Red Dot Winner: Orizuru Chair

Designed by Ken Okuyama for Tendo Co., Ltd., the Orizuru chair was inspired by origami paper cranes. The chair won a product design Red Dot award for 2010.

From the Red Dot website:

Origami, the art of folding paper into sculpture figures and geometric objects has a long tradition, particularly in Japan, its country of origin. It required concentration, a lot of time and a high degree of creative imagination. Origami can produce highly complex structures and is made without the use of scissors or adhesive glue from a single square sheet of paper. The design concept of the Orizuru chair adopts the structural folding technique of origami; its shape is inspired by a paper crane. Similar to an origami design, which is folded from only one piece of paper, Orizuru too is made from a single piece of plywood. And just like a paper crane, this chair when seen from the side seems to float in mid-air like a magical object. Despite this visual lightness the chair offers high stability and spring comfort for everyday use yet bearing up to 400 kg of static weight. Its high load-bearing capacity is also derived from the origami technique of structural folding, in combination with the choice of material: the ten layers of plywood include two extra sheets of rice paper to absorb the applied glue in order to strengthen the structure. Even the technology used to actually form this chair is astounding: its complex structure is created via a special single moulding press technique of Tendo Mokko, which already facilitated the shape of the famous “Butterfly” stool in the middle of the 20th century. Due to its design and its embodying a linking of tradition with innovation, the Orizuru chair is an object of high symbolic meaning, an object of complexity that at the same time reflects the meditative simplicity of origami.

Jaime Derringer, Founder + Executive Editor of Design Milk, is a Jersey girl living in SoCal. She dreams about funky, artistic jewelry + having enough free time to enjoy some of her favorite things—running, reading, making music, and drawing.