This futuristic $6,000 chair was designed with data from the Polaris Dawn mission

Artist and industrial design icon Ross Lovegrove’s work has always looked like the space-age future—and he has now partnered up with SpaceX on a project that sees him revisiting one of his most famous pieces from the past: The Bernhardt Go chair.

CreativeWorkStudios is a company that fosters collaborations with an eye toward art, science and philanthropy. Having worked on a project that connected artist Refik Anadol with the NASA-funded Translational Research Institute for Space Health, CreativeWorkStudios turned to Lovegrove for its next endeavor, a partnership with the Polaris space missions to raise funds for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Ross Lovegrove [Photo: J Harry Edmiston/courtesy CreativeWorkStudios]

Lovegrove created the flowing Bernhardt Go chair—“probably my favorite object”—at the turn of the millennium. With its absence of straight lines and legs that are seemingly reversed, it has a futuristic aesthetic that has landed it a spot in the film Passengers and other sci-fi projects. Which is perhaps why his partnership with the space exploration company feels so immediately organic (and causes you to momentarily forget who owns SpaceX). Using data from the landmark Polaris Dawn mission, Lovegrove is now retrofitting the Bernhardt Go into its next evolution: The $6,500 Polaris Go.

A Magnesium-Injected Innovation

It’s apropos that Lovegrove is working with SpaceX on a project involving this particular chair. Years ago, he was invited out to the company to possibly become its design director—and when he got there, he discovered a couple hundred Bernhardt Go chairs in the canteen.

[Photo: courtesy CreativeWorkStudios]

While the first Polaris Dawn mission last year yielded a few firsts, such as the first commercial spacewalk, the Bernhardt Go scored one of its own when it launched in the early 2000s. Lovegrove originally designed the chair in aluminum, but found it to be too heavy. So he decided to use pressure die-cast magnesium, which weighs about 30% less without compromising strength. Thing was, it had never been done before, and has not been done since (the chairs were sealed and powder-coated, and are safe).

“How can I say it—it won’t burst into flames, but it’s highly flammable,” Lovegrove says with a laugh. “It took us a while to find somebody who would take that risk.”

The Bernhardt Go was hit, with TIME citing it as one of 2001’s best designs, and various museums adding the chair to their collections. 

[Photo: courtesy CreativeWorkStudios]

After partnering with CreativeWorkStudios and the Polaris team for the new project, Lovegrove reached out to Bernhardt, which had 210 originals left—and he says the company handed them over.

“I mean, to suddenly give up your whole stock is pretty remarkable,” Lovegrove says. “And it’s because of the St. Jude’s component. Which is not cynical—it’s incredibly sincere.”

Earth from Polaris Dawn [Photo: Jared Isaacman]

Taking a New Seat

Polaris mission commander (and current nominee to lead NASA) Jared Isaacman has a history of raising funds for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which the Polaris program has partnered with for its trio of missions. Lovegrove says it’s a cause close to him, as well, owing to a number of family members he has lost to cancer. 

As he devised ways to update the chair for the project, Lovegrove homed in on the seat pan insert. He decided to utilize data from the shockwaves of the launch to create a pattern emerging from four corners.

“[It] is a metaphor about the co-joining of forces for the crew members—so, the four coming together form a total balance, and a kind of dynamic unity … that comes from the abstract forces of nature.”

[Photo: courtesy CreativeWorkStudios]

Lovegrove says he wanted to find a U.S. supplier linked to the space program to make the inserts, which he was able to do. He could have created it with, say, a 3D-printed polymer—but that doesn’t exactly represent space. So instead, the team used an aerospace-grade aluminum alloy, which is laser-cut to a finite dimension and then pressed incredibly thin so as to not impede the weight of the chair. The names of the four astronauts, meanwhile, are set to be laser-engraved onto the pans.

“Ultimately, I’d like to even look at anodizing those, possibly in other colors, so that we could do a limited edition as we roll this out,” he says. “In a philanthropic way, we have to sell these … we have to appeal to people.”

[Photo: courtesy CreativeWorkStudios]

The chairs are priced at $6,500 and are available for preorder on the project website, with 50 percent going to St. Jude. Lovegrove adds that this is the start of a larger project with CreativeWorkStudios and Polaris, where he’ll take more data and interpret it in various ways, particularly around the physical impact of space on the human bodies.

“If you look at space programs now, all the space adventure and business development, I think it’s going to pull [the human race] forward. I think it’s going to pull everything into a whole new mindset,” Lovegrove says. “They always say the most abstract thing that mankind can ever do is go into space, because we’re absolutely not designed to go into space. And then engineers come up and say, ‘Hey, we’re doing it.’”

As for that forward momentum—it’s always been visually evident in the chair since the start. Has that always driven him?

“Everything that we do has an implied energy in it,” he says. “I don’t like static things.”

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