Shell Chair: A Plywood Seat That Trades Four-Legged Certainty for an Unfolding Experience

The four-legged chair is one of design's most settled agreements: a box of stability we lower ourselves into without a second thought. The Shell Chair reopens that agreement. Its question is disarmingly plain: how can a chair offer a different experience? The answer is a seat whose backrest breaks into separate plywood panels that fan open around the sitter. It feels less like furniture you use and more like a small structure you enter and balance within.

Designed by Maryam Moradi and Reza Kabudmehri and published on uni.xyz, the project sits in the territory of architectural furniture design, where an everyday object becomes a testing ground for structure, material and perception. The designers do not argue against stability. They argue against a standardised expectation of it, and they make their case with plywood, CNC precision and traditional joinery.

A Backrest That Unfolds Instead of Enclosing

The opening sheet sets two chairs side by side, and the fan-shaped, split backrest takes over the composition immediately. A solid back would cup the body. Here the separated panels hold the shoulders while leaving gaps that let light and air through. The designers describe this as enclosure without rigidity, and that phrase captures the project's central move: support is spread across several planes rather than gathered into one surface.

This matters because it shifts the emotional register of sitting. The chair asks to be read before it is used. The open shell signals that the object is meant to be met, an encounter with form and balance, and the designers put perception and excitement alongside comfort as goals.

Exposed Plies and the Logic of the Repeated Object

Lined up in a row of three, the chairs show off their slatted seats and three-legged frames, and they read as a product as much as a sculpture. Plywood carries both readings. Its strength-to-weight ratio keeps the chair light while preserving load-bearing capacity, and its layered grain is left exposed, an act of material honesty that turns the edge of every panel into a visible record of how the sheet was built.

The repetition also makes a production argument. CNC machining gives the precision and easy assembly that a multi-panel design needs, and plywood keeps the piece affordable and scalable. The chair sits where workshop craft meets digital fabrication, which is where much contemporary architectural furniture is now made.

Splayed Legs, a Thin Spine and Joinery That Stays Out of Sight

The front and side elevations reveal the structural story behind the gesture: splayed legs, a thin spine and a three-panel backrest. The slender legs and angled supports spread loads across a stable base without adding visual weight. Components are joined with traditional mortise-and-tenon joints reinforced with wood glue, a deliberate choice of time-tested methods for longevity and clarity. The lower structure gains extra rigidity from a double-bolted connection between the main bodies, fixed with a double-sided screw that stays visually discreet.

The elevations also prove the designers' point about multiple perspectives. Front-on, the chair is a fan. In profile, it becomes a lean diagonal of spine and leg. That shift in proportion and silhouette as you move around it is a quality usually given to buildings, and it suits the chair to exhibition settings as well as interiors. The gaps between seat and back panels add rhythm and negative space, so the structure reads cleanly from every side.

Why This Project Matters

The Shell Chair treats a chair as architecture at the scale of the body. Its most useful lesson is restraint. There are no exotic materials or elaborate mechanisms, only one sheet material, a familiar joint and a careful split of the backrest into panels. From those limited means, Moradi and Kabudmehri create an object that changes how sitting feels and how a chair is perceived from across a room.

For young designers working between architecture and product design, the project shows how a single clear question can organise every later decision, from grain exposure to bolt placement. Innovation here does not come from complexity. It comes from looking again at the most familiar object in any room and asking what else it could do.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Maryam Moradi, Reza Kabudmehri

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Project credits: Shell Chair by Maryam Moradi, Reza Kabudmehri.