Chimi Chair 3

The chimi is an ornamental roof-end tile placed at both ends of the ridge on a traditional Korean hanok's hipped-and-gabled roof. Architecturally, it reinforces the structurally vulnerable ends of the ridge; formally, it traces a dynamic curve suggesting a wing or tail surging upward into the sky. Symbolically, it has long served as a guardian against fire and misfortune, marking the threshold between earth and sky from the building's highest point. Chimi Chair (3) translates that single upward instant — the moment the chimi lifts off the ridge and surges toward the sky — directly into the chair's skeleton. Slender, pliant oak members curve upward in one unbroken line from the seat to the top of the backrest, holding a silhouette that seems to carry the very tension of the chimi's wingtip an instant before flight. The two curved members running from the legs into the backrest trace divergent paths, crossing and then splitting apart again — a structural reinterpretation of how the chimi builds its sense of ascent not from a single mass, but from layered, overlapping curves. With ornament and finish kept to a minimum, and the piece built from nothing more than the grain and curvature of solid oak, the chair lays bare the chimi's particular dynamism: timber, which carries real weight, appears to defy gravity and reach upward. Before it is an object to sit on, this chair is a line — one that draws the upward gaze once directed from a hanok roofline toward the sky, and pulls it into the space of the room.