Hasta La Ideas

I’m loving the BARkwadraat table, designed in a collaboration between Eveline Pieters’ Green Tuna Design brand and Joene Verschuren, a former art therapist turned furniture designer. The BARkwadraat features precisely carved legs (CNC’d by the look of them) that interlock and snap together via embedded magnets, making it an extra handy flatpack table that can easily be assembled without tools. Added bonus: The top is made from one of my favorite materials to see being used—scraps and cutoffs.

Here’s how it all comes together:

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Things that earn the (coveted?) “Things That Look Like Other Things” designation are nearly always designed expressly to look like the aforementioned “other thing,” and Floris Wubben‘s “Eyrie” Chair is no exception. (If anything, the appellation speaks largely to how much the thing looks like the other thing.)

The nest of a bird is an inventive piece of natural architecture. As a designer, who works a lot with natural material, I was always fascinated by these natural structures. The Eyrie Chair is an ode to these natural constructions.

During my search for branches I was specifically interested in… the specific forms of these wooden branches, [which] inspired this design.

In order to achieve the naturalistic effect of curved wood, Wubben used steam-bent ash slats, joined with ash pins and wood glue.

I’m curious as to whether or not the chair is comfortable for long stretches—the best sign of a good lounge or armchair is whether or not it’s suited for napping. Perhaps the tangle of wood slats gradually “warps” to the shape of a sitter’s body, over the course of hours, days, weeks…

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Designer Michael Kluver recently completed his degree from Design Academy Eindhoven and he’s pleased to present one of his student projects, “Just Chairs,” on the occasion of Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, from October 22 – 30. It’s a fairly straightforward concept: Kluver has taken four iconic chair designs from the 20th century and essentially undesigned them by mapping each one to “the simple archetype form” of a chair, sort of the Platonic ideal of four legs, a seat and a back, with the “same seating height, seating width, seating depth, overall height, and angle of the backrest.” Signature details are flattened and reduced to purely aesthetic elements, signifiers for more (or arguably less) idealistic design philosophies.

Do we need to produce more new stuff every year? Isn’t it time to slow down and look for quality and context again? A chair is for sitting. It sounds simple enough right? The original designers of these morphed chairs searched for a way of living and had an overall vision of how life should be. Over the years their designs however were ripped completely out of context and became expensive designer objects. Let us restore context again. Let them be just chairs again.

Can you identify each one? Answers after the jump…

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Earlier this week, we had a glimpse at “Move It,” a collection of cardboard furniture at Tent London during last month’s London Design Week 2011. Designer Ruben der Kinderen completed his degree at Eindhoven in 2010, where he’s been living and working there ever since, and he’s pleased to present one of his latest projects, “Folding Furniture.”

der Kinderen notes that 1.) these days, it is often “less expensive to buy a new product than it is to repair it,” and 2.) “Many products are also not or hard to recycle and reuse.”

Sometimes, however, you need furniture that you use only occasionally. For a party or a festival. With this in mind I designed several pieces of temporary furniture using the pop-up folding techniques. You can fold them flat for easy transport and storage. To use them, unfold like you do a book.

Hence, his interest in two-ply corrugated cardboard, a material known as “Re-board,” which is “similar [to] MDF, but light as a feather due to its internal sandwich construction… It’s durable, light-weight, water resistant [and] fully recyclable after use.”

Where “Move It” looked a bit more like furnishings for children—and couldn’t quite be flat-packed, due to the the tubular legs—der Kinderen’s minimalist forms are quite (as they say) strapping indeed.

Let’s call it (a very of-the-moment) “Pop-Up shop chic”… not least, as der Kinderen points out, for its “excellent printing properties (directly onto the material).”

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MCM fans are certainly already clamoring over House Industries’ recent collaboration with Herman Miller Asia-Pacific, a custom Eames Low Table Rod (LTR), unveiled at Herman Miller’s Reach exhibition in Hong Kong on September 16. A total of 80 tables have been produced by Herman Miller; each tabletop is hand-printed—with letters, numbers and ornaments from the Eames Century Modern font collection—at House Industries’ factory in Grand Rapids, Michigan, then “returned to Herman Miller for assembly then packaged in a special House Industries-designed wooden crate.”

Suffice it to say that the tables themselves are absolutely gorgeous, as is the packaging, which was treated with equal consideration:

As with most House Industries projects, we tried our best to make the packaging for this limited edition something you wouldn’t throw away once the table was removed. Who doesn’t like a printed wooden crate that can do double duty as a storage container?

They’re rather more classic looking than Alessandro Canepa and Andrea Paulicelli’s “Fontables,” a Mid-Century Modern mash-up for those of you who aren’t over it.

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