Monthly Archives: April 2011

Smoke Dining Chairs (2002) are what designer Maarten Baas calls them. (Manufactured by the Netherlands based Moooi.) Burn them with fire is what he did. He result is preserved in an epoxy coating. The upholstery is leather. The set also includes a chandelier and arm chair.

The manufacturer warns: Each piece is unique and may differ due to the process used for production.

Indeed. Fire answers to its own muse.

American architect John Lautner described himself as "part psychiatrist and part metaphysician." "Fluent containers" is how one writer described his work.

This house is the famous Elrod residence in Palm Springs. A house that "folds" into its surroundings: The house as meadow and vice versa.

Clearly, the Elrods would've been the best of neighbors.

In his 1957 novel The Door into Summer, Robert Heinlein imagined a vector plotting robot named Drafting Dan. By the 60s CAD (Computer Assisted Design) had been fully adopted into the auto, aircraft, and ship building industries. (The technology was born as early as the 40s).

More recently, CAD-bots have encroached into more traditional handmade industries like fashion, jewelry, furniture, and — heaven forbid — art. Of course, it was inevitable that CAD would evolve beyond its role as a mere tool and have a profound influence in actual design.

That fact that just about every architect alive also designs furniture probably has something to say of the seduction of furniture's intimate scale. We are consumed by architecture; Furniture, like other things we love, we cozy up to.

Daniel Libeskind designed the Spirit House Chair, above, for The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. In a collaboration with Nienkämper, the chair is constructed from a snuggly 14 gauge stainless steel.

Below, a Libeskind designed tea set in sterling silver for Sawaya & Moroni.

Below, more tea sets, more silver, and more geometry: This time from the mind of Zaha Hadid.

Think Buckminster Fuller in a dumpster dive: The Bravais arm chair by Liam Hopkins. The triangular columns were inspired by forms found in wasp nests and crystals. The chair is made from 200 cardboard components assembled by hand. See more here.

The honey comb Radiolarian sofa was a collaboration between Hopkins and artist Richard Sweeney at Lazerian studio, Manchester.

The form of this Diamond Chair by Tokoyo-based Nendo is owed to the molecular structure of diamonds. The chair was produced in two pieces in a 3D printer process called selective laser sintering (SLS). (Sintering takes a powdered material and fuses it into a mass with a high powered laser and scans it into cross sections, following a 3D CAD model.)

The process of Rapid Prototyping allows complex shapes to be rendered in one unit.

Below, one from the Crystallization collection designed in collaboration with Dutch designer Iris van Herpen, architect Daniel Wedrig, and 3D printer MGX. For this piece a form is created in a series of shapes and then repeated and scaled over and over to create a single volume.

Below, a digital bowl designed by Kathryn Hinton.

Chairs by Danish designer Mathias Bengtsson: Below, the Cellular chair. Made of lightweight epoxy resin its design simulates the structure of regenerating bone.

Bengtsson took a more traditional approach with the Slice chair. Though its final manufacture includes laser cutting into 3mm layers, the design was first drawn and then modeled in clay before going into the computer.

The Slice as manufactured in wood above, aluminum below.

Listen to nature. She knows.

She gave us red and made it seductive. It demands attention. (Is it seductive because it demands attention or the other way around?) It's erotic, it's cocksure, and it's a warning.

On the effects of red there is no doubt: What better laboratory for market testing is there than evolution?

Two more proofs:

Q: What's sexier than a cream-covered load of sweet empty calories?
A: A red load.

(Ever hear the joke about the mouse that drives a Ferrari to the pit to help save the lion?)

So, there you have it: Total id tweaking through seductive engineering; All debts to Mother Nature.

Now, let's see red used to more subtle effect:

An accent with a flower...

... or a warm field overwhelming a white room...

... and then the whelming turned up even more as it goes brighter and shinier. (With a pink and gray sofa offering a cool buffer on the interstice.)

And then, buildings that crescendo in the eyes.

A crescendo version as delivered to the suburbs.

Color favors the bold: Above, classic Hermes blood red.

The sleek of this kitchen roughed up slightly with rustic touches and red accents: A material carnival of tile, unfinished and finished wood, glass, plastic, stainless, and colored silicon implements.

A washer and dryer in red: Not quite sexy but pretty close. (Certainly, it wouldn't be sexier in any other color.)

I don't remember where I read it but someone once wrote: The engineer is the small god.

And any discussion of the divine would also have to include the engineers of the sensual and aesthetic, artists and designers. Like Woody Allen said, why not the divine? You have to model yourself after someone.

Fullness and volume: Like the meadow, it practically screams fertility and abundance.

Sculpted and topiary-like, it's the head aspiring to be a hedge:
I walked abroad, / And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge / Like a red-faced farmer. / I did not stop to speak, but nodded, / And round about were the wistful stars / With... faces like town children. - Thomas Ernest Hulme

In our gardens and in our hair, it's the human delusion of having nature at our feet.

A marquise by Peter Paul Rubens from 1606.

Like pale Wisteria in bloom...

Tonsorial couture: Taking the landscape beyond the usual boundaries.

A dress made from 165 ft of human hair by Croatian company Artidjana (their Croatian language website here).