Rethinking the patio chair: Konstantin Grcic’s latest, the Waver
You might not expect one of the world’s premiere furniture designers to jet from Munich to Los Angeles so that he could focus his creative genius on the office cubicle, but that is essentially what brought Konstantin Grcic to California recently, at least in part.
The German designer paused to chat at the Culver City office of Vitra before moving on to visit tech companies in the Bay Area. The goal: to rethink office furniture, dreaming up new physical environments that reflect how a new generation of employees conceive, collaborate and innovate.
Ideas from this trip may percolate for years, so we turned the focus on this edited Q&A to the present — more specifically, Grcic’s quest to create a different kind of outdoor chair for manufacturer Vitra. The new design is called the Waver.
What was the starting point for this chair?
There is plenty of outdoor furniture, but it is the same kind of furniture we use indoors, just put outside. It doesn’t really question how different this outdoor space is. Consider the size of it: [The Waver] is quite a big chair. In an office or a home, there is a lack of space, but the outdoors is almost the opposite. A normal chair can seem ridiculously small outdoors. The proportion of this chair we thought was interesting.
What about function?
Outdoors, it’s another kind of sitting. It’s more like this. [He changes poses, from leaning forward with hands in front to leaning back with hands on armrests, body swaying gently from side to side.] You sit enjoying a view, or reading, or listening to music, or sun bathing or sleeping.
Why support the bottom of the seat with straps attached to the armrests?
The straps are part of the whole concept of the chair, which is a seat that is suspended rather than supported. There is movement here. There is a nice, easy … [his voice trails off as he sways back and forth]. It’s like wind and water. Also, at night or wintertime, you want to take the cover indoors. The ease of dressing and undressing the furniture created the need for another kind of construction.
For materials, you borrowed from the world of sports?
We looked a lot at sports equipment. The boom of the wind surfing rig has an element like this — strong materials. Then, of course, the colors as well, and having the ability to separate and unzip this thing.
Despite the scale of the piece, it has a lightness to it, doesn’t it?
The swivel base is something we took from indoors to outdoors. It’s something you associate with an office chair, but we thought, isn’t this nice? [He swivels the chair slowly from side to side.] It’s sort of like a rocking chair, but horizontal. It’s a movement that comes with comfort.
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