Hasta La Ideas

I’m digging the Dual Cut chair/ottoman combo designed by Kitmen Keung. Global citizen Keung, who’s lived in Hong Kong, Canada and Italy, designed the piece for Belgian manufacturer Sixinch.

Splitting a raw rectangular foam block with only two L-shaped cut lines, Dual Cut is a transformable furniture piece that employs the simplest production processes true to the materials in use with minimal wastage. It features two ergonomically comfortable seat back angle options of 6° and 23°, and the multi-formation ability to form a one seater with a side table, a chaise lounge or a corner table. It also easily forms a neat, compact parcel for convenient storage and transportation.

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One of our favorite designers from this year’s New York Design Week is Brooklyn-based Chen Chen. The recent Pratt grad shares with Sight Unseen a step-by-step guide on how to recreate his “Metamorphic Rock” bookends currently sold through Philips dePury. Check out the full profile on Chen Chen and detailed directions on Sight Unseen.

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Thanks to evolution, nature has balance designed into it, and it is us humans who typically muck that balance up with our deforesting and overfishing. It’s in our nature to build things and overtax them, whether it’s schools, slums or cell phone networks. So it was surprising to see, during this past weekend’s flash snowstorm in the American northeast, a sort of design failure on nature’s part.

Perhaps “failure” is not quite the right word, but the situation I’m referring to has to do with the design of leaves and their annual cycle of disappearance. Leaves are “designed” with a broad surface area, like a solar panel, to maximize photosynthesis and water collection. When the seasons become too cold for photosynthesis to be viable, the leaves die and drop off. Once it starts snowing, a leafless tree is much better able to hold snow on its bare branches without any ill effect.

But in this weekend’s case of snowfall in the Northeast, the leaves were still on the trees, and when the unseasonal snow started falling, it started piling up on that broad surface area, turning a canopy of leaves into an enormous source of deadweight. Branches designed to hold a certain amount of weight were suddenly struggling under the load of many times that number, and the result was many incidents of catastrophic structural failure. Branches and trees collapsed, blocking roads and downing power cables in unexpectedly high numbers, leaving more than two million people without power and causing far more devastation than a leafless-tree winter storm might.

The failure, of course, might be our fault; it’s possible that the early snow came as a result of something we’ve unwittingly done to the environment.

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This is the second piece in a series exploring cork from designer and educator Daniel Michalik. As a prelude to this series, Michalik produced a beautiful photo gallery documenting the cork harvest.

One morning in mid-July, I drove out to the cork forest of southeastern Portugal with Joana Mesquita and Raquel Castro of Corticeira Amorim (the world’s leading producer of cork stoppers) looking for cortiçadores: the men and women that spend three months a year stripping bark from cork oak trees. What I found was an industry unlike any other—one that is predicated on environmental and cultural stewardship as a means to economic success. A natural resource that grows more robust and healthy with regular and responsible development.

Portugal is the world’s single largest supplier of cork, producing over 53% of all exports of cork stoppers and related products. This small country boasts almost 1 million hectares of cork forest. Of these, many are wild, natural forests like the ones I have visited. It is estimated that Portugal’s cork forests absorb 14 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year. A cork oak is harvested every 9 years, and the forests are on yearly, rotating harvest cycles. While one area is harvested, the others are left alone to grow.

Cork trees as seen from a balloon over the Alentejo region of Portugal, near the town of Beja, 2 hours SE of Lisbon.

Trees damaged by human hands will not produce profitable raw material, so a unique model of natural material sourcing has developed in which profitable extraction leads to numerous environmental improvements. Forest protection (and protection of related habitats) is the key to maximizing the profitability of the yearly cork harvest. It is estimated that dozens of species would be extinct were it not for the cork forest, including the Iberian Lynx and Imperial Eagle. The concentration of biodiversity within the European cork forest makes it one of the world’s best models of wildlife conservation.

Trunk showing inner bark that carried nutrients, with two consecutive harvest cycles, spanning 18 years. The inner bark is kept from damage during harvest, as healthier trees make for more profitable forests (and better environmental conditions overall).

The cork forest, or montado, is a hot, dry place in the summer. Daily temperatures easily run past 35 °C (95 °F) and the dust and flies are incessant. Still, between May and August the cortiçadores work from dawn to dusk at a brisk, almost manic pace. Speed is key because at any other time of year the bark grips fast to the trunk, making any harvest impossible.

We followed the farm manager into the forest, parked our suffering Peugeot in a dusty lot, and climbed into a tiny work van that bumped along impossibly twisted dirt paths, through unforgivingly thick brush, followed by a hike through the brambles to a ridge overlooking the montado. All around us were the cork trees in various stages of being denuded.

We found roughly 30 men working in teams of 2-3 to harvest a dozen or so trees in the area. Some balanced like tightrope walkers on narrow branches, effortlessly swinging their razor-sharp axes and flipping tubes of bark off the branches. Others worked around the main trunks, swinging as high above their heads as possible. They removed 5-meter long sections of cork in a single piece. The bark from an entire tree trunk would be removed in two sections; an entire tree could be stripped in 15 minutes.

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Take a look at the piece of wood above and ask yourself how that nail got there. It’s no photo trickery, the nail is actually where it looks to be. So how did they do it? Those of you who’ve worked extensively with wood, understand its properties inside and out and are familiar with operations you can perform on wood to temporarily alter it will probably figure it out. For the rest of us it will be a surprise.

(You may want to turn the sound down on your computer, the video has a pretty annoying soundtrack.)

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