The Long Way Back to the First Idea

Every designer has an origin object, a patient-zero object from which they caught the bug that would mutate into a career. For Adam Goodrum, it’s a folding chair he built in third year at University of Technology Sydney (UTS) over 3 decades ago – for a project that didn’t even demand such a thing. Thirty-odd years on, that chair – reworked, re-engineered, but recognisably itself – is going into production as the ‘Loop Chair’ for Powerhouse Made.

The brief back then was an industry collaboration with Sebel Furniture, a plastics manufacturer that once supplied institutional seating to Australian schools. Goodrum, taught by Carl Nielsen (whose name, through generous bequest, now graces the Powerhouse Design Accelerator award) became fixated on articulation: the idea of a chair moving between forms rather than simply incarnating a shape. He later built a one-off timber version and used it as his desk chair for years. It never went further than that until Yasmine Ghoniem of YSG – the interior design studio overseeing the Powerhouse Residency project – pushed, hard, to get it into that project on a tight production timeline.

The realised chair splits into 3 distinct geometries: a looping frame of 30mm tube that runs from front legs into backrest, a middle leg in 10mm aluminium plate, and a seat produced in recycled plastic by Defy Design, a Sydney manufacturer founded by former students of Goodrum’s who sort, clean and remould waste plastic at increasing scale. Forty chairs are destined for the outdoor area of YSG’s residence space within the new Powerhouse Parramatta building, another 30 inside, in colourways developed in close collaboration with the studio.

The second piece, a folding stool Goodrum calls ‘Restitch’, has an equally circuitous history. It descends from Stitch, the chair put into production in 2008 by Italian manufacturer, Cappellini, off the back of Goodrum’s win of The Sydney Morning Herald’s Young Designer of the Year award a few years prior; itself born from cardboard prototypes he built at his kitchen table. (This early prototype (opens in new tab) is now in the permanent collection of Powerhouse.)

Where the Cappellini original used a riveted piano hinge, the Powerhouse Made version, commissioned by architect George Livissianis for the restrained, aluminium-forward interiors of his Powerhouse Parramatta restaurant space, replaces it with an integrated hinge – knuckles laser-cut and rolled directly from 2mm stainless steel, a resolution Goodrum had wanted from the start but which proved too costly for Cappellini’s run. Finished raw and matte rather than mirror-polished, it folds flat enough to hang on a wall by a single finger hole, doubling as sculpture and spare seating.

What connects both pieces isn’t a shared material or colour cue back to the Powerhouse Collection (opens in new tab), but something more personal: his recollections of a museum he wandered through as a young and friendless design student newly arrived from Perth.