The Ahrend 360, an ultra-light visitors’ chair with a magnesium frame and a one-piece seat shell, has won a Red dot Award from the internationally renowned Designzentrum Nordrhein-Westfalen. This durable and innovative chair boasts a surprising and refreshing design.
Magnesium is usually obtained from sources such as sea water. Its melting point is much lower than that of aluminium and this has favourable consequences for the energy consumption during production. Magnesium is a very light material, about 30% lighter than aluminium.
Jeroen Verbrugge of Flex the INNOVATIONLAB: “The challenge for us was to combine aesthetics with a wide range of applications, sustainability and the latest technical developments. Often a chair is either one thing or the other, but the Ahrend 360 is a successful synthesis of all these aspects. It is a chair with a sympathetic look and eye-catching lines that complies with strict ergonomic and sustainability requirements. This is expressed by such aspects as our choice of magnesium, which is a quite uncommon material in the office furniture industry.”
In its basic form, the Ahrend 360 consists of only six parts: four legs, a frame and a seat shell. All connections are screwed instead of being bent, welded or glued. No further machining is necessary after the first production procedure (forming ‘tubes’ from blank material). This benefits production time, costs and energy usage.
As standard, the chair has a polypropylene seat shell, but it can optionally be fitted with a wooden shell. Even when fitted with a slightly more heavy wooden seat shell, the weight of the Ahrend 360 is still less than six kilos. The Ahrend 360 can be stacked upright and linked, both with or without armrests. This stacking feature makes the chair ideally suited for use as a conference chair. Stacking and moving the chair is also quite simple due to its low weight.
The chair is widely used in schools, restaurants including company restaurants, meeting rooms and conference venues and has also found its way into those private houses with a trendy interior, reflecting the trend that the warmth, atmosphere and materials in both home and office environments have come to resemble each other ever more closely.
Pressrelease Ahrend 1 november 2009
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