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Furniture Design

Gala Systems' Clever Spiralift Design Turns Columns Flat to Create Disappearing Auditorium Seating

By Rain Noe - February 19, 2018

Auditorium seating might not sound like a glamorous subcategory of furniture design, but when it's done right, it really stands out. Previously the neatest system we'd ever seen was the Genya system, designed by Dante Bonuccelli and produced by Italian manufacturer Lamm.

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Another nifty system is Ziba's Jumpseat Auditorium Seating, which won a Core77 Design Award.

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With both of those systems, the seating surface seamlessly disappears into the backrest. The next level of design, however, is where the seating disappears entirely. Swiss company Gala Systems has created an incredible system that relies on spiral lifts that can move entire rows:

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Here's the crazy thing: That spiraling column you see in the videos is not really a column. Meaning when it disappears into the ground, it's not sinking down into a cylindrical shaft, but is actually unspooling into a relatively flat space. What the engineers have figured out is how to turn a long, flat ribbon of steel into a column:

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That's pretty darn brilliant.

Furniture Design

Rain Noe

Rain Noe is a writer and industrial designer based in New York City.

4 Comments

Christopher Hanks

a year ago

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Reply

Lifts that assemble and disassemble as needed, fascinating!

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Bobtato Smith

a year ago

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Z

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The mechanism is cool. The seating is ludicrously overengineered.

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Ken K

a year ago

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Spiralift: Utterly freaking awesome. Brain-rattlingly clever. OMFG.

I see that they patented the spiralift idea in 1989, so it's been around for a while. But I'd never even heard of it. Thanks Rain.

I also see that "rigid chain," including zippered rigid chain (!) is used in the same way, for the same purposes. Fascinating. Again, something I'd never heard of.

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Paul Elia

a year ago

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Reply

Hey Rain
Gala is a Canadian company.

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