Three years from conception to finish, I carried out numerous experiments and put in a lot of time for the development of this chair.
I wanted to create a chair that is totally new, one that has never existed, and one that would inspire people.
The concept of this chair evolved from an article that I had read in the National Geographic. The article in the prestigious American magazine mentioned fibers that are blown out like a spiders web, and optical fibers, and spoke about the future of miraculous fibers from a scientific and technological angle. The moment I had set my eyes on the article, I had a firm vision of the future in my head.
My idea of a structure of the future was, against common belief, not to secure strength using hard materials, but to systematically organize small fibers so as to gain strength by spreading the stress.
I wondered if I could create an entirely new type of chair in which the fiber itself is the structural body and which feels like sitting on air. After a good many trials and errors, I thought of a chair which finish is uncertain until it has been baked in a kiln and of its making process, and named it after a food that everybody in the world is familiar with. That is the PANE (bread for Italian) chair.
The PANE chair goes through almost the same steps as baking bread. A semi-cylindrical block of fibers is rolled, inserted into a paper tube, and by baking it in a kiln at 104 degrees C, the fibers memorize the shape of the chair. It is way beyond the conventional methods of making a chair; it is a bread-like chair.
I believe that a deliciously comfortable PANE chair with an original feel has been baked by the innovative process of a new idea, material and structure.
Tokujin Yoshioka