ZHA and Nagami 3D Print the Echo Chair From Recycled Industrial Plastic

Zaha Hadid Architects has collaborated with Spanish 3D printing specialist Nagami once again on a piece of furniture, and this one is built entirely from recycled industrial plastic. The Echo Chair debuted at the London Creates design show, and it is hard to walk past without staring.

Designed as a Single Print

The Echo Chair was not assembled from separate parts after printing. The arching backrest and the scooped seat were produced in one continuous pass, fused from the ground up. The ribbed surface that remains visible is not a finishing choice made after the fact: it is the natural texture of the FDM layers, left exposed by design.

ZHA project design director Sebastian Andia said the ambition was to turn an abundant, overlooked resource into something people want in their homes. The recycled material comes from single-use industrial plastics, mostly PET from medical waste streams. Nagami specializes in exactly this kind of feedstock, and the result has a caramel tone in one of the four available colorways.

Four Colorways, Each With a Story

The chair comes in black, white, a white-to-translucent gradient, and a bio-based cork composite that produces a warm caramel finish. The cork option is the most unusual: it mixes recycled plastic with cork granules, giving the piece an organic texture that reads more like a natural material than a recycled one.

The gradient finish is the most visually striking. It shifts from opaque white at the base to translucent at the top of the backrest, and the transition happens inside the print itself, not through post-processing.

Why This Matters Beyond Design

Large-format 3D printing with recycled plastics is still expensive at small scales, but Nagami has been steadily proving it can work for actual production runs. The Echo Chair is not a prototype. It is a limited-edition product, and every unit was printed on industrial pellet-fed systems that can handle post-consumer and post-industrial waste without sorting or washing to food-grade standards.

For the architecture and design world, the Echo Chair signals that recycled 3D printed furniture is moving from concept to showroom. ZHA is not a studio that makes statements lightly. If they are putting recycled plastic at the center of a seating object, the message is that the material is ready for mainstream interiors.

Where It Was Shown

The Echo Chair was on display at The Truman Brewery in London as part of the London Creates trade show, an architecture and design event curated by ZHA. The show ran through early August 2026.