tulip
stadium seat

The brief

A blow-moulded seat for public space, engineered for the National Football Stadium in Bratislava. Designed in 2014; the stadium opened, and the seat met its public, in 2019. The requirements were unglamorous and absolute: survive weather, crowds, and years of use; install fast across thousands of positions; cost what mass production demands. None of that is what anyone notices.

Designed to disappear

In a stand of thousands, no single seat should shout — people come for the match, not the furniture. But quiet is not the same as plain. The name gives it away: Tulip is named for its shape, and the shape is where the work went. Inside the hard limits of blow moulding I pushed the tooling to its edge, chasing near-perfect ergonomics — a form that holds a body comfortably for ninety minutes, season after season, in any weather, without ever asking to be noticed.

Mass production always forces compromises, but the shape reached the stadium close to what was first proposed — and I used the manufacturing itself to improve it. Because it is a tip-up seat, I widened the seat and thinned the backrest exactly where the folding mechanism sits, so a spectator's sitting bones rest on the shell, not on the hardware — the small, constant discomfort most competing seats leave in.

The engineering lived in an exchange of SOLIDWORKS files — geometry refined for the mould, the draft angles, the double-wall shell, the stacking and fixing. Quiet, technical work, all of it bent toward a single poetic curve.

Range, proven

Tulip sits at the opposite end of my work from a one-off pavilion or a premium collection: high volume, ruthless durability, thousands of identical parts. What sets it apart is what you feel — I spent the design on comfort and a poetic shape, pushing blow moulding to its edge for ergonomics you rarely get at this scale.

Designing well at that end takes the same system thinking — aimed, here, at both manufacturing reality and the human body. The collaboration with Sedasport continues — further arena seating is in development.