Aku-hydra Chair
Role
Solo Designer
Tools
Fusion 360 / Rhino
Materials
Acrylic + Steel
Year
2025
A continuous-shell lounge chair built on Frutiger Aero's optimistic, glassy futurism — translated into bent acrylic and welded steel.
All memories can live here and now.
Objective: To design lounge chair for boutique hospitality lobbies and creative office lounges seeking a sculptural, optimistic centerpiece.
User: Designers and small-batch furniture buyers who want a statement piece that still seats comfortably for extended periods.
01 · Design Brief
Early-2000s optimism, reimagined as a seatable form.
Frutiger Aero abstracts the physical world — water, sky, glass — into glossy, hyper-clean visuals. Gradients, transparency, glow, saturation: a deliberately specific reference point, not a generic moodboard.
FURNITURE PRECEDENT
Furniture Precedent
Aku-hydra takes inspiration from timeless sitting designs such as Eames plastic chair that uses simple molding method to obtain more complex shapes.
03 · Ideation
From sketch wallto a single continuous loop.
Wide divergent exploration across furniture typologies, traced forward into the final shell-and-loop concept. Ergonomic data — seat height, depth, backrest angle — grounded the form before it was modeled.
Ergonomic reference
Highest seat height
16.0"
Lowest seat height
11.9"
Seat depth
17.5"
Backrest inclination
110°
04 · Fabrication Process
Vertical acrylic bending, start to finish.
The shell is a single 0.25" acrylic pattern, heat-bent in strategized vertical directions to close into one enclosed form. Every step below was physically built and tested before the next began.
Mold Making
Welding & Bending
Assembly & Finish
05 · Final Design
One continuous shell, three colorways.
CMF · COLOR / MATERIAL / FINISH
Blue gradient shell
Frosted white shell
Orange gradient shell
Stainless Steel Metal
Eber Zamudio
ID Portfolio
Aku-Hydra