Hasta La Ideas

The Saji Chair – Ash veneer and mild steel

Sitting in the emergency room after sustaining a somewhat minor chisel wound to her forearm, Laura Kishimoto calmly taught those around her to fold origami parabolas. The injury was a small price to pay in fabricating her latest design, Saji Chair, a marvel of geometry not far off from the parabolas she was creating that night.

A senior in the Department of Furniture Design at the Rhode Island School of Design, Kishimoto often looks to geometry for inspiration, an influence that is evident throughout her work. President of the Origami Club in high school, half-Japanese Kishimoto has been toying with the limits of paper to create new forms from a young age.

Close up of Leaf Chair, made from craft paper, epoxy resin, expanding foam, mild steel

Star Weaving, wooden dowels and elastic bands

“Geometry is both a tool and a crutch in my design process,” says Kishimoto. “I find it impossible to create an original idea without some foundation to build upon. Geometry is very useful in this respect since it is an established system of rules, easily broken down into logical patterns. Its abundance in the natural world also irretrievably links to our subconscious conception of beauty.”

Working in the determined system of mathematics, Kishimoto tries to break that sense of predictability to maintain an element of intrigue. By adapting a more intuitive process, she strives to create unique forms in each piece that departs from the expected to arrive at unparalleled results.

Below are three of her projects, the Yumi Chair, Tessellation Cabinet, and Nautilus.

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My favorite thing about the iPad is having dozens of books in one place. Having grown up lugging my share of dead trees around, I’ll never not appreciate digital book storage and access.

This is especially true after coming across the Bookwheel, the rather massive sixteenth-century design for a mechanical book “server” that you see above. Designed by Agostino Ramelli, a military engineer who spent his professional career creating siege machinery, the more peace-minded Bookwheel was intended as a convenient way to reference multiple books. Heavy tomes didn’t need to be lugged from shelves, and they could be left open on the last page you’d read, unmolested by the rotations; Agostino’s design ensured each shelf remained at the same angle no matter the wheel’s position.

The device was reportedly never built, at least not in Ramelli’s era; but the design for it was revealed in his humbly-titled book The Various and Ingenious Machines of Captain Agostino Ramelli, printed in 1588. Interestingly enough, Ramelli’s designs have since been criticized as the work of an egomaniac; detractors claim his mechanisms were overly complicated, with extraneous convolutions added purely to demonstrate his mechanical prowess.

That didn’t stop Daniel Libeskind from creating a version of the Bookwheel for the 1986 Venice Architecture Biennale. Libeskind’s version, reverse-engineered from Ramelli’s image, was called the Reading Machine.

An interview with architect Hal Laessig, a former student of Libeskind’s who had helped with the Biennale installation, reveals it to be a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction endeavor.

First off, according to the interview, then-professor Libeskind pressed his Cranbrook students into building the machine for him. And apparently architecture students at Cranbrook weren’t taught about wood expansion back then:

…There were two guys who built the Reading Machine by themselves with no power tools, out of ash, which is an incredibly hard wood. I don’t know how they did it. They basically slept in the woodshop.

But when we got to Venice, the hot, humid air had swollen all the wood, so it wouldn’t turn. And the teeth on the gears would start snapping. So we had to sand all the parts down—for days—to get it to turn.

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Another take on the “desk with a gutter” is the My Writing Desk, from Lithuanian design couple Inesa Malafej and Arunas Sukarevicius. I love the form of this one, with its bent plywood wings, and the more modernist worksurface that’s pure form-follows-function—the rectilinear shape accommodates two drawers.

Function follows form, too: Because the corners are negative space, cut out of necessity for the steam-bending, you’ve got a handy notch to both hang a bag and route cables.

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Remember the wicked Oeben mechanical desk we showed you back in November? If you don’t, let us refresh your memory:

In the original post, we expressed our hope that someone like Brian Grabski would take a crack at recreating the 18th-Century masterpiece. Grabski’s a little busy running his own business, but unbeknownst to us, another craftsman had actually decided to recreate Oeben’s work.

John J. Leko is an Alabama-based woodworker and furniture builder, a graduate of the Marc Adams School of Woodworking, and is currently pursuing a Fellowship at that school. Last June he had an opportunity to study Oeben’s original mechanical desk at L.A.’s Getty Museum, and he’s decided to reproduce it for the Fellowship:

His instructors might have said “No,” but the Kickstarter community said “Yes”: Leko’s met his $6,000 target and there’s still nine days left to pledge.

Speaking of days, several hundred of them will go by before this fiendishly-complicated project is complete. Leko’s anticipating the sheet will come off by July 2014.

Thanks Steven!

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Following yesterday’s spelling lesson, here’s a quick tip to remember the difference between the three homophonous words that are pronounced “PAL-it”: palate, which most closely resembles ‘plate,’ refers to the sense of taste; palette denotes a mixing board for paints, as in several early 20th-c. French art movements; and a pallet is a portable platform for moving goods, as in “pal, let me move those for you.”

As of last May, I happen to be a bit more familiar with pallets than I ever would have anticipated: several members of our NYC team were on build-out duty for last year’s “All City All-Stars” exhibition, which incorporated some 300 pallets in Laurence Sazarin’s exhibition design. (You can check out the largely unseen raw making-of footage here.) All of those pallets were the standard North American dimensions of 48”×40” (1219mm×1016mm), but we did encounter a EUR-pallet (also known as a “Euro pallet”) in the early stages of the build, which is how I learned that they use slightly smaller ones overseas. EPAL—the European Pallet Association, of course—specifies not only its 1200mm×800mm&times144mm (47.2”×31.5”×5.7”) dimensions but the prescribed pattern of the 78 special nails that hold them together.

However, EPAL has no jurisdiction over young German designers Yanik Balzer and Max Kuwertz, who recently sent us an upcycling project in which they transformed a Euro pallet into a set of three chairs “with almost no waste of material.”

Hit the jump to see results…

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