The puffed and pinched appearance of Chinese fortune cookies informed the design of this plastic armchair created by Brooklyn studio Jumbo for US manufacturer Heller.
The Fortune chair was designed by Jumbo founders Justin Donnelly and Monling Lee to evoke the instantly recognisable form of the cookies often served in Chinese restaurants.
Lee, who emigrated to the US from Taiwan when she was 13, has fond memories of her first family visit to a Chinese restaurant where she enjoyed breaking open a cookie to reveal its fortune.
This experience informed a design that playfully reinterprets the cookie's pinched-circle shape as a chair with bilateral symmetry ? meaning it retains the same shape when flipped over.
Jumbo has created a chair for US manufacturer Heller "Our studio is always looking for ways to make objects that are more reductive than those that have come before," Lee and Donnelly told Dezeen. "One way we do this is to push symmetry, especially bilateral symmetry."
"The human body is not bilaterally symmetrical, so we have developed several tricks to make this work," the designers added. "By puffing up the forms, these simple, platonic geometries can become much more comfortable."
The two friends originally designed the Fortune chair in 2020 as a part of their Creature Comfort collection, which was presented online as a series of digital models.
The chair was intended to be made from aluminium, but in 2022 Heller president and ...