Hasta La Ideas

All photos by Mark O’Flaherty & Petr Krejci

American Hardwood Export Council and RCA are pleased to present Out of the Woods, an exhibition on the occasion of London Design Week, at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

An innovative collaboration between the american hardwood export Council and the Royal College of Art Design Products programme offers a fascinating approach to working with an age-old material—American hardwood. Out of the Woods explores the creative and environmental potential of this naturally renewable material by looking at the entire life cycle of each product. Working with British furniture producer benchmark, internationally renowned for its craftsmanship in wood, RCA students—under tutors Sebastian Wrong (Established & Sons) and Harry Richardson (Committee)—have each designed a chair or seat using American hardwood. The production was carefully monitored with the help of sustainability experts, P.E. International, to prepare an accurate life cycle impact report for each chair. The reports contribute to AHEC’s ongoing research into hardwood’s sustainability credentials and inform the students of the full cradle-to-grave environmental impact of their design and material choices. Inspired by the life cycle of each chair, twelve well-known writers have created a work of art to tell the story: Adventures of Twelve Hardwood Chairs.

The designs have been developed in to working prototypes with the help of Benchmark, internationally renowned for its craftsmanship in wood and long-standing relationship with designer Terence Conran. The students camped out on Terence Conran’s lawn by night and descended on Benchmark’s workshops by day in early July where the company’s highly skilled craftsmen, led by owner Sean Sutcliffe, helped them turn their ideas into reality.

Several of the designers in Out of the Woods participated in the school’s collaboration with Yamaha, not to mention the most recent graduation show, and the results are strikingly diverse. AHEC has also posted a series of short videos about the individual pieces (two projects per clip), embedded below. Nearly every single one is worth seeing in action, and it’s definitely worth hearing the designers explain their work in person.

Prior to enrolling at RCA a year ago, Lauren Davies wanted to create something more permanent than the set designs she’d been working on, and she’s got something to show for it. The “Leftovers Chair” is a “chair that could be described in the form of a recipe.” The iconic Windsor form is made from “a variety of American hardwoods… several of which are nutbearing species” and further infused à la gastronomy: “the seat… is ‘pickled’ with vinegar, the legs are ‘smoked’ and the spindles of the back are ‘flavoured’ with fruit essences” (which impart their subtle coloring).

If Nicholas Gardner and David Horan seem like an unlikely pair on paper, you wouldn’t know it by looking at their brilliant “Phyllida” bench. The former, an RMIT alum (in arts and furniture design), “came to RCA in order to get a more conceptual grasp of design,” while the latter studied mechanical engineering and transport design prior to enrolling at RCA. (No disrespect to the other designers, but the video for “Phyllida” is probably the must-see of the bunch.)

…inspired by a work by the sculptor Phyllida Barlow, Horan and Gardner’s design wraps a thin material to create not just volume but also a surprising amount of strength. Pieces of ply just 1.5mm thick are rolled up to create the legs of a 2m-long bench in solid tulipwood. The legs fit in to tulipwood base rings, and to a circular groove in the underside of the bench. When the bench is to be carried, the ‘legs’ unroll to become flat, and the base rings slot in to another set of grooves in the underside of the bench.

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