Ejection Seat Project
Ejection Seat
Wow. This was an unusual commission and great fun to work on. Whilst attending an antiques fair with his interior designer, the client spotted an ejection seat from a fighter jet for sale. Although he didn’t buy that one, he went home and looked into decomissioned ejection seats further and managed to buy another one which was from an F4 Phantom.
Client Brief
The client intended to use the seat as his office chair but as it was designed to be mounted within an aircraft cockpit it was very top heavy and likely to topple backwards, it was the wrong height for an office chair, it was very heavy and had no support. The client is a very keen collector of art and was very open in his brief to create an interesting stand for the seat.
Design
We were invited over for a meeting by the client’s interior designer, and from the moment I saw the seat, I instantly thought of H.R. Giger’s work, the artist who created the Alien from the Alien movies. I immediately felt the dark atmosphere of the movie, with the rivets, tubes, and the mechanical features that I knew we could bring to life by morphing it into a some terrifying organic creature. I intended the design of the seat to be quite different from the front and the back. From the front I wanted it to look like an ejection seat but to give clues that there was something else going on with it, and as you move around to the back it transforms into some alien creature. I achieved this by using the ejection firing channels at the back of the seat to form a spine and ribs from which we could grow a tail that wraps around the front of the seat.
The combined weight of the seat and support was around 200Kg, so we had to make sure the seat was seperable from the support. This was achieved by using mechanical fixings to assemble it.
Client Testimonial
The brief was met with great enthusiasm and Bex and David had great vision and excitement about our project. The design process was hugely interesting and fascinating to watch the developmental process and interoperation of what we wanted.
It was a very enjoyable experience working with BexSimon… The end product is something fantastical and I would recommend working with BexSimon again.
