Hasta La Ideas

Every woodworker, carpenter or furniture builder has dreamt of making something completely out of wood scraps and cut-offs, even if that stained poplar wouldn’t match the ash board and the birch ply. You just think of how cool it would be, and you wonder what it would look like.

Well, Piet Hein Eek has actually done it. A lot. (See our coverage of his show last year in Milan at Spazio Rosanna Orlandi.)

The Eindhoven-based designer makes chairs, stools, benches, beds, tables, bowls, cupboards and cabinets all from scrap wood (presumably not his own cut-offs, unless he has the world’s largest woodworking shop). The attendant prices do not place these objects within the reach of the common person; I’m posting word of the objects here primarily so you can see what they look like.

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What’s the most frustrating thing a furniture designer will have to endure? The pitch meetings? Production challenges? Supply-chain hassles? We’re going to say knock-offs. Because their presence means that after you’ve endured all of the initial hassles and successfully brought your product to market, someone else swoops in and starts illegally capitalizing on your hard work.

The Danish furniture design fixture Republic of Fritz Hansen is no stranger to piracy victimhood, with countless knock-offs of their iconic Series 7 chair populating cafes and undiscriminating households worldwide. With international legal battles difficult to pursue, the company has taken matters into their own hands via the social media route, releasing this YouTube video showing an impromptu strength test:

The original Series 7, as Arne Jacobsen originally designed it, seems quite a bit stronger. Taking a look at the attention lavished on its construction provides clues as to why.

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If you want to start a company today, you have to name it something douchey like Quantegrity or Innovaria. The title of your company and your frothy mission statement wouldn’t provide a clue as to whether you made refrigerators, medicine or holistic pet food. So I love that in 1912 you could start a company called The Metal Office Furniture Company. It’s pretty clear what you make, and what you make it out of.

The Metal Office Furniture Company started out doing file cabinets and safes, and starting in 1914, the product you see up top. It might not look like much, but that’s essentially a lifesaving metal wastebasket that helped launch an office furniture giant.

In 1914 you could still smoke at work, and people would dump their ashes in wastebaskets. Which wasn’t great since wastebaskets were made out of wicker or wood. The MOFC filed a patent for the “Victor fireproof waste basket,” which was novel because it was made out of metal, but painted to look like wood (your choice of walnut, oak or mahogany). It solved a common problem, it was attractive by the standards of the time, and it was affordable, so a lot of office and hotel managers decided that buying them would be better than burning to death in a fire.

The Metal Office Furniture Company thrived, making their way into every ‘History of Industrial Design class’ curriculum with their Frank Lloyd Wright desks from the the 1930s, and they eventually changed their name to Steelcase, which is better than Quantegrity.

This month Steelcase turned 100 years old, and to celebrate they’ve launched 100.Steelcase.com, where they’ve rounded up 100 famous creative thinkers like Don Norman (hey, we know that guy), Paola Antonelli, Patricia Urquiola, and others to sound off on what the future will bring.

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The amateurish presentation of the website and the corny name put me off, but anytime someone attempts to completely redesign the common chair, I have to take a look. The Soul Seat is bi-level chair consisting of a “perch” and a “platform,” with no arm rests, no lumbar support and no back, that “occupies a different paradigm” from conventional office seating.

The design is informed by how a healthy body settles on the ground. It affords you all the posture choices that evolved with us over thousands of years of sitting without chairs….

…As you get up from… your Soul Seat, notice how the range of motion in your hips and the strength in your torso hasn’t been compromised by the work you need to do today. Giving you access to that experience is what we’re after at Soul Seat.

Interestingly enough, judging by the video testimonials on their site, the chair seems to be aimed exclusively at female creatives.

So how does the thing work? Have a look at said testimonials, below. You don’t need to watch every minute of all three videos—in this first one the subject, a designer, discusses and demos the relevant aspects of the chair for just the first three minutes of the vid:

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Imagine designing something today that would still be in production in the year 2165. It’s virtually unthinkable, no? Yet cabinetmaker Michael Thonet designed his iconic Chair No. 14, often referred to as the Thonet Chair, 153 years ago in 1859. And today, in Manhattan alone, you can find any number of bistros and cafes littered with them.

This quick, sub-five-minute documentary looks at the No. 14, hailed as “the most successful industrial product of the 19th century,” and shows you how that came to be. The new-at-the-time bentwood manufacturing technology, an ingenious packing method that was a precursor to flatpack, and of course the design itself all played a role. (Don’t forget to note the proper pronunciation of “Thonet,” so you can be that person at the cocktail party that corrects everyone.)

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