Whether it’s a disobedient power cord or an extra-long headphone line, unruly cables can overwhelm an otherwise organized desk. RISD industrial design student Kebei Li offers a simple solution with the );…
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In 1993 Swiss artist Heidi Bucher passed away at 67 years old, leaving behind a portfolio of thoughtfully executed work. Bucher began making rubber latex casts over parts of houses comprising her life back in the…
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This aluminium furniture and lighting was cast inside sheets of heat-resistant fabric in a process developed by French designer Julien Carretero.
The Stencil collection comprises a lamp, bench, stool and table and was created by Julien Carretero at the Beeldenstorm artists’ workshop and foundry in Eindhoven.
The designer wanted to create a flexible and low-cost system of production without the investment costs required by aluminium injection moulding.
An early experiment with a fireproof blanket gave him the idea to use heat-resistant fabric for the moulds, and he eventually settled on a woven fabric made of silica that can resist up to 1200°C.
Sewing a mould from pieces of fabric would be time-consuming and would also require Carretero to break open and re-sew the mould each time, so instead he decided to clamp the fabric in a steel stencil and pour the aluminium into it.
“The heat of the aluminium is not high enough to harm it,” Carretero told Dezeen. “This way you can reuse it over and over.”
“The Stencil proposal doesn’t require any investment cost,” he added. “All you need is an oven to melt aluminium, which is something you can find almost anywhere in the world in local foundries. It’s even possible to melt aluminium with a simple torch – that’s how I made my first try-outs.”
The weave of the fabric produced a textured pattern on the final pieces that wasn’t intentional but was a pleasing by-product, he said.
Carretero studied industrial design in France and England before completing a Master’s at Design Academy Eindhoven, where he submitted a polyurethane foam casting process as his final project.
Other projects by Carretero we’ve featured on Dezeen include a collection of lamps, tables and stools made by scraping a profile into hardening plaster and a domestic fan made from industrial components.
We’ve also featured a concrete side table cast in a fabric mould and aluminium stools cast from fish.
See all our stories about Julien Carretero »
See all our stories about aluminium »
Here’s more information from the designer:
The Stencil collection is the first series of aluminium pieces of furniture ever cast in fabric. It is the result of experimental research aiming at turning the complex aluminium casting technique into a flexible and low-cost system of production. In order to do so, the number of steps required along the process is reduced to its minimum and the need for complex and expensive infrastructures is avoided.
Economic flexibility arises from the lightness of the method that encourages locally set production facilities. Technical flexibility is brought through the use of extremely basic and low-cost re-usable mould systems made from raw flat materials. High-temperature resistant fabric is clamped in a steel stencil and the fused aluminum is poured into it. Unlike usual metal casting processes, once the mould is unclamped and the piece released, it can instantly be reused for another casting. This process does not create any waste as the aluminum left overs can be melted down and the fabric reused over and over.
Materials: cast aluminium, varnished waterproof MDF, veneer
Project assistants: Sabine Roth, Lauren Tortil, Jason Page, Vincent Tarisien, Paolo Sellmayer, Anaïck Lejart, Geoffroy Gillant
Stencil was made possible thanks to the open-mindedness of the Beeldenstorm metal casting workshop (Eindhoven).
The post Stencil furniture
by Julien Carretero appeared first on Dezeen.
Royal College of Art graduate James Thompson cast the spaces between objects in the college cafe and used the resulting shapes to make furniture-like sculptures.
Thompson mapped the spaces between objects like armchairs and pool tables using Jesmonite, which is typically deployed to create decorative mouldings.
The resulting sculptures are mounted on wooden structures to resemble a new interior based on the same spatial relationships.
Thompson graduated from the college’s Design Products course and Parallel Architecture is on display at Show RCA 2012 until 1 July.
Last week we published a movie with Design Products course leader Tord Boontje giving a tour of the show – watch it here.
See more stories from Show RCA 2012 »
Here’s more information from the designer:
My work deals with our perception of space and its interpretation. My approach draws inspiration from the description of space in cubism and the potential duality of space and time, composed of parallel worlds and higher dimensions that exist alongside our own. Documentation is a key feature of my work, used as a working methodology and an outcome itself, evidenced through the creation of a tools and a systems used to record, re-map and translate a given space into something else.
Parallel Architectures:
Design a system that can be used to document and re-map a particular space and time, to define new interior pieces. The work uses the current formation of a space, the RCafe at the RCA, as the start point to build a functional parallel interior, from that space, for that space.
Cast jesmonite paths map the space, illustrating distance by creating connections between objects, these connections relay on each other for support, they cannot stand alone. The casts used describe space at that particular time and are used to influence to shape of the other, parallel re-constructed space they will become. In the re-constructed space these negative in-betweens are then filled and populated to bridge this gap and give new function to this empty space.
London Design Festival 09: London designer Benjamin Hubert will launch a concrete desk lamp for design brand Decode London at 100% Design in London this week. (more…)
Designers Studioroom906 have created a set of five porcelain containers that have different shapes but can all contain 150ml. (more…)
Dutch graduate Pascal Smelik has created a collection of wine glasses by plunging hot wax into cold water and making casts from the resulting forms. (more…)
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