Hasta La Ideas

Beijing Design Week 2011: Beijing architect Naihan Li presented crates that unfold to become a collection of furniture at a pop-up disco lounge for Beijing Design Week.

The largest crate at Concierge in Dashilar Alley folded out into a mini cinema and karaoke box, while others became chairs and tables.

Other crates from the collection conceal folding sofas and beds, while some contain dressing tables, kitchens and wardrobes.

One of the wooden storage boxes folds into a table football.

Lee teamed up with curator Beatrice Leanza as part of the collective think-tank BAO Atelier to create the Concierge installation for the festival.

Folding stools from the collection were also on show at the WUHAO teahouse during the week – see our earlier story here and see more stories about Beijing Design Week here.

Another range of furniture designed around packing crates was presented by Dutch designers Studio Makkink & Bey in London last year – see more about this project in our earlier story.

Here’s some more information from the festival organisers:

BAO Atelier for Beijing Design Week 2011

Architect and designer Li Naihan’s latest series of home and office furniture The Crates (2011) is inspired by the volatile and exuberant spirit of a contemporary urban habitat like Beijing and its epic detournment of building construction, decay and regeneration.

Li’s mobile creations accommodate with poetic comfort the moody impracticality of globe-trotting, and always on the move lifestyles.

Sofas, beds, bookshelves, workstations, and foosball tables pop out of their own shipping shell to form a unique spatial language that is whole with a ‘total’ concept of dwelling.

Wooden crates become carapaces to contain the body, objects and memories we carry with them: situational freeplay and sculptural abstraction blend here to make room for a design practice which is intrinsically relational and open-ended.

In this occasion, a brand new all-in-one media box is going to be presented, inclusive of a mini- cinema, a dj deck, lights and karaoke appliances, multimedia screens and a seating area.

Concierge is developed in collaboration with Beatrice Leanza, curator and co-founder with Li of Beijing-based studio BAO Atelier, a creative lab integrating curatorial, editorial and design production to promote new encounters and transversal research among the visual arts, design and architecture.

This special installation materializes an inexistent part of an actual building dubbed ‘The House of Leaves’, a semi-private/semi-public residence located on the edge of the 5th Ring Road in Caochangdi village.

Drawn upon an intimate image of both action and reflection, this serendipitous space represents an antechamber of no definite time or spatial confines, a public retreat and an interior garden activated by a politics otherwise known as ‘meeting’.

Daily talk-shops and presentations are accompanied by impromptu cooking sessions kindly provided by local food lovers.

See also:

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Crate Series by Makkink & Bey	Authentic Wood by Le Corbusier	Woodware by Max Lamb