Peter Traag

"Traag is fascinated by mass-production and how it might be thwarted to make products less ‘generic’; the things he makes are governed almost entirely by his desire to challenge and unpick furniture manufacturing processes".

LTD

Vacuum moulded wool upholstery

"He began by looking at the by-products of a process: when objects are vacuum-formed, in plastic or plywood say, there are always parts that sit outside the mould and are discarded. But if you worked with fabric as structure rather than skin, the drape and gather effects at the edge of the mould could actually be quite attractive and even functional. Peter had recently been experimenting with making chairs and shoes from layers of fabric bonded and stiffened with polyethylene. He had initially used a press with a positive and negative mould to form the chairs, but eventually arrived at the vacuum-formed pieces in My World.



The fact that the form of the LTD chairs is derived from sucking multiple layers of fabric into a void is quite revelatory to grasp. It seems unfathomable that sucking gluey upholstery wool through a 2-dimensional circle or hourglass template could yield curves so perfect — twin curves indeed — or a seat so comfortable.

In a nice concession to industry standardisation, the sequence of layers making up the sofa and each chair is one-third of the exact configuration of colours in textile manufacturer’s swatch book".

Sponge

"I started thinking about the mould as a container that holds a material together, but that doesn’t have to define its form. Instead of using steel, I started working with more flexible materials like Lycra and PVC that will deform when the foam expands. The shape of the chair therefore is not completely predictable and every seat will be different.
Inside the flexible mould a fabric cover is placed which is hugely oversized so that every time the foam is injected it can go its own way producing all the wrinkles in a random fashion. Once all the foam is injected the mould is closed and the pressure of the expanding foam builds up and forms the chair".

What happens if you form the chair by sucking an upholstery skin too large for the unstable volume of material within until it fits? What happens, of course, is that you get infinitely varied crumples of fabric and compressions of foam and lots of different chairs out of a single mould and process.

130

"I started thinking about the mould primarily as a container that holds a material together, but that doesn’t have to define its form. Instead of using steel, I've worked with more flexible materials like Lycra and PVC that will deform when the foam inside is expanding (± 20 times it's volume in just 60 seconds!). The shape of the chair therefore is not completely predictable and every seat will be different.
Inside the flexible mould a fabric cover is placed which is hugely oversized so that every time the foam is injected the chair can go its own way producing all the wrinkles in a random fashion. Once all the foam is injected the mould is closed and the pressure of the expanding foam builds up and forms the chair".