Is It a Gyroscope or Sculpture? Nope, It’s a Chair

Here’s a way to enjoy a 360-degree view. Part swivel chair, part hammock, this gyroscope-recalling outdoor lounge chair lets users rotate to get the best view, like a desert sunset, or even to avoid intense sunshine altogether.

The chair is made of three solid steel rings. The outermost ring is stationary, creating a framework so the two inner rings can spin. A curved, padded lounge chair sits on the innermost ring.

The piece is now part of a new permanent installation at Taliesin West, the main campus of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture in Arizona. “It is meant as an elaborate piece of outdoor lounge furniture, though it really looks like a sculpture when not in use,” says Kate Brown, the interior designer who dreamed up and fabricated the chair.



The idea blossomed inside a secret garden outside Wright’s famous living quarters at Taliesin while Brown was a student in a two-month immersion program at the beginning of 2014. Inside the garden is a Japanese-style moon gate, “a circular pass-through allowing access to the areas outside of it,” she says. One day she decided to sit inside the moon gate and was surprised by how comfortable the curve of the circle was. “I wanted make a chair that was similar, and started sketching up ideas,” she says. “I love things to be interactive, so the plan to have the circle be able to spin was a natural choice. Adding the other rings was purely for the aesthetic value and can make it feel like you are in a gateway to another universe.”

The chair wasn’t an assigned project, so Brown was stoked when the school offered to make the piece a permanent installation on the grounds in mid-April.





The biggest challenge for Brown was finding someone who could bend steel into perfect 8-foot-wide rings. “After a lot of phone calls, I finally found someone in the city and was recommended Ironwood Artistic to aid with the fabrication, since they had done a lot of work with the school in the past,” Brown says. “Beautiful craftsmanship and amazing talent went into creating it.”

Brown fabricated and put the chair together at Ironwood Artistic in Phoenix, then loaded it onto a pickup truck and drove the 30 miles or so to Taliesin.






Brown worked out the bugs with that first one and says she can fabricate the chair for around $8,500 in about three to four weeks.

You can also visit the chair during tours of the surrounding shelters built by the students, but be sure to check the calendar. Due to the heat in summer, the school halts all desert tours May through October.

More: See a bed-size shelter designed by another student at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture

URL: Is It a Gyroscope or Sculpture? Nope, It’s a Chair http://www.decor-ideas.org/cases-view-id-23697.html