Aditya Rathod

Category: Furniture

Competitions: Home Competition 2025

HEIKO is a bamboo chair born from a material-driven design inquiry — a pursuit of balance between structural clarity, craftsmanship, and the expressive potential of a single natural material. The chair is designed, developed, and prototyped entirely out of bamboo, without the use of any secondary materials for joinery or support. This self-imposed constraint became the core design challenge, guiding decisions in both form and construction. At the heart of the chair’s identity are its parallel bent bamboo splits that form the seat and backrest. These continuous curves not only respond ergonomically to the human body but also showcase bamboo’s natural flexibility and tensile strength. The minimal, rhythmic structure reflects a quiet harmony — a nod to the name HEIKO, meaning “parallel” or “in balance” in Japanese. The piece is an exploration of restraint, where design is distilled down to what the material itself makes possible. In addition to its material and structural considerations, HEIKO was conceived with sustainability at its core. Bamboo, as a rapidly renewable resource, offers a compelling alternative to conventional hardwoods — it grows quickly, requires minimal processing, and has a remarkably low environmental footprint. By choosing to work solely with bamboo, the project embraces a regenerative approach to design — one that aligns with the ethos of circularity, material responsibility, and low-impact production. The chair seeks to demonstrate how natural materials, when understood deeply and used thoughtfully, can lead to solutions that are both ecologically sound and aesthetically enduring.