This design focuses on the modern representation of traditional furniture and how it acts in people’s lives. The brief centres around a memorial seat for Sir Ian Athfield and after a site visit I was inspired to make something different, something that resonated in Sir Ian Athfield’s work. The seat must interact with the environment harmonically and let people feel peace and leisure. In Chinese traditional furniture, I found a classical type of seat that meets these requirements, LuoHan Chuang. It is a piece of special furniture that can be used in both indoor and outdoor settings, as a bed and as a seat. After thousands of years, this famous furniture stays almost the same with its classical form and appears in many famous paintings.

I designed the seat in a way in which takes the traditional principles and brings them into today’s setting using modern materials and aesthetic principles. The site is on a series of hills which reminds me of traditional Chinese paintings. I have chosen to use a perforated plate to represent this view abstractly, strengthening the connection with the site.