Panton Wireframe: A robotic rod-bending love letter to Verner Panton’s 1967 fully-molded plastic chair.

Much like Panton's original chair which took advantage of new production techniques and materials (i.e. fully-moulded fibreglass composite techniques) to create a single surface chair design that drew on the structural performance and pliancy of doubly curved shell forms, this project is fabricated from the non-standard bending of steel rods precisely controlled via a robotically mounted rod-bender and an external-axis steel bar cutter developed specifically for the project at the University of Technology Sydney’s [UTS] Advanced Fabrication Laboratory. Robot control (i.e. instruction code) is automated from the Rhino3D design model using custom Python interfaces developed by the authors for this work.