Dirk van der Kooij

Endless

The project

‘By combining different techniques, I was able to design an automated, but very flexible process. I taught a robot his new craft, drawing furniture out of one endlessly long plastic string. This makes it possible for me to design in the good old fashioned way, making a chair, evaluate, refine, making a chair, evaluate, refine, making a chair, endlessly.’ Dirk van der Kooij.

Committee

By continuously ‘spitting’ a kind of shoelace of melted recycled plastic in every conceivable colour, an old robot arm from a Chinese factory constructs a chair lying on its side. Layer after layer, the chair gets its recognisable yet technically unidentifiable shape, fitting into the newly emerged need of designers to develop their own production machinery.

— 'It could very well be that this chair becomes the design icon of the year.' (C.R. Dutch Design Yearbook, 2011)

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