I had a friend who was a lute builder (luthier) and lutes have a pear shaped back of curved, tapered slats that remind me a lot of this chair’s form.
Think of peeling an orange and sectioning it by its own segments into a hemisphere. Each orange section is a wedge with flat sides coming to a point and a curved face opposite.
If you take one section and bend some thin slats of wood to conform to the curve you can attach it to the curve and use the sides of the section to plane the edges to mate with the next section. Once all the sections are so planed, the whole may be edge-glued over a solid form (representing the original half-orange.) Fiberglas and resin can be used along the seams inside for added strength.
Lutes are pear-shaped so the sections would not really be a hemisphere, but maybe you get the idea?
George
