Trama

Trama is a lounge chair reduced to three families of components: turned wood rods, injected thermopolymer joints, and a woven surface made from sansevieria fiber. There are eleven parts in total. There are no screws, no adhesives, and no metal fittings.

The structure resolves the seat on three ground contact points instead of the four found in a conventional chair. A vertical axis forms a T in elevation, and the base opens into a V in plan. The woven surface spans between the upper nodes and carries the user directly — the same element provides the seat, the backrest, and the suspension.

The project takes its posture from the hammock, an object that in the Yucatan Peninsula is not decoration but daily infrastructure. It takes its material from sansevieria, a regional fiber whose story is developed in the Sustainability section.

The name comes from the Spanish word trama, the weft: the transverse thread that crosses the warp to build cloth. In general use the word also means the underlying structure of something, what holds it up from below. Trama names the chair twice — literally for the woven surface that seats it, and figuratively for the frame and joint system that holds it together.

Three families of components, each made independently, each replaceable without touching the others. The chair is a set of decisions about which parts to have, not a formal composition of shapes.

The four nodes carry the whole logic of the chair. Each one fixes the angle between the rods it receives, which means the geometry of the chair lives in the tool, not in the assembly. A user cannot assemble the chair incorrectly, because the sockets only accept one configuration.

The nodes are conceived as solid volumes with blind sockets for the rods. For injection moulding, thick solid sections cool unevenly, producing sink marks on visible faces and extending cycle time. Two production routes resolve this: core the interior with internal ribs keeping wall thickness uniform, or use gas assisted injection to hollow thick sections during moulding while maintaining the outer surface.

Assembly is one sequence: insert the rods into the nodes, then tension the weave over the upper nodes. The weave is the last step and also what locks the frame — tensioning it pulls the upper nodes together and preloads the joints. Disassembly reverses the order, and no tools are needed either way.

Trama ships flat. Six rods lie parallel in a single bundle, four nodes nest in a corner of the pack, and the weave folds to a volume close to that of the rods alone — a fraction of the assembled chair. A flat pack this close to the rod bundle's own volume reduces transport volume and the freight emissions that follow it.

A conventional chair distributes load across four legs. Four points are statically indeterminate on an uneven floor, which is why chairs rock. Three points define a plane, so a tripod is always stable without adjustment.

Trama uses three ground contact points. Two front legs and one rear leg form the base. In plan the structure opens as a V with a 90 cm diagonal envelope, giving the piece a wide footprint that resists the overturning moment produced by the reclined backrest. In elevation the vertical axis and the horizontal member cross to form a T, and the backrest continues from that intersection.

Reducing four legs to three removes one part, removes one joint, and removes the need for floor levelling. The saving is not only in material — it is in tolerance.

In the Yucatan Peninsula the hammock is a normalised object. Its comfort does not come from padding. It comes from a suspended surface that deforms under load and distributes pressure across the body instead of concentrating it on a few contact points.

Trama translates that behaviour into a fixed frame, set at 65 degrees from the horizontal. The woven surface is tensioned between the upper nodes and hangs slightly under the user — it is this give in the surface, not a hinge in the frame, that lets the seated posture settle and adapt. The chair does not imitate the shape of a hammock. It borrows its principle.

Sustainability in this project is not a layer applied to a finished object. It is the consequence of the engineering decisions described above, and it can be read at each stage of the life cycle.

Trama's woven surface is sansevieria, a fiber whose extraction runs almost parallel to that of henequen, the agave that once shaped the Yucatan economy. That industry declined, but the knowledge of extraction, cleaning, and spinning did not disappear with it — sansevieria can enter production on land not suited to more intensive crops, using skills and equipment the region already has.

Four properties make it suitable: low water demand and high resistance to disease, which reduces agricultural inputs; rapid propagation, which shortens the cycle between planting and harvest; complete biodegradability with no synthetic content; and a fiber yield per leaf that offsets its modest output per plant.

The absence of adhesives is what carries all of this. The frame is held by socket geometry and by the tension of the weave, so the same sequence that assembles the chair takes it apart. What separates is already sorted: wood to biomass, fiber to compost, nodes to their own stream — with no shredding, no chemical separation, and no residue of one material clinging to another.