It might not look like it, but inside this box, there's an armoire, a desk, a height-adjustable stool, two more stools, a six-shelf bookcase, and a bed with a mattress. Casulo, the brilliant, modular setup designed by Marcel Krings & Sebastian Mühlhäuser, hides furnishings enough for an entire room -- or, heck, an entire apartment -- in a small 31"x47" (that's 80 cm x 120 cm) box. Two people can lift, carry, and assemble (and then disassemble, when it's time to move) each piece of furniture within the Casulo in about 10 minutes -- it requires no tools for assembly -- and every part of the boxy exterior is used, negating any need for extraneous, wasteful packaging. Smart.
Casulo won the "Abraham & David Roentgen Award" in November 2007 for its "cleverness, finesse and qualitative realisation of the idea" and we think it's quite well-deserved; what a perfect solution for frequent movers and small space dwellers alike. More pics, plus a video, of the unboxing process, after the jump. ::Casulovia ::DesignSpotter
The Robotic Chair is an apparently practical and generic wooden chair with the unique capacity to fall apart and put itself back together. This chair has the familiar form of those used to furnish schoolrooms. Yet it is not like any other chair. It is a chair with an obsession: it is perpetually falling apart and getting back together. Behind the chair´s veneer of wood is a custom robot designed to locate its other chair components and reassemble itself. For no apparent reason the chair will fall apart and crash to the floor. It then transforms into a robot and begins to step off any parts it may have fallen on top of. Once clear, the robot is able to drive about the floor in search of its parts. The chair sees through an external camera and is able to locate its legs and back. Once located it docks with its parts and secures them in place. When all the components are attached the chair stands up and the cycle begins again.
The Robotic Chair’s obsession with falling apart and putting itself back together is an insistence of its constancy, its coherence, its identity, and its trust-worthiness, in a word, its object-hood. As a work of art, The Robotic Chair expands the sense of real space and real time in which objects are experienced. It reconciles technology and art before the viewers’ eyes.
Whether you're a design junkie who obsesses over every piece of furniture in the house or a low-maintenance IKEA type, there's no question that the surfaces on which you sleep, eat and lounge are a big part of your everyday life. And like most choices we make, the furniture that fills our home not only affects our comfort levels, but also has an impact on the environment and our health.
There are many good reasons to seek out green furniture: Keeping excessive manufacturing waste out of landfills; saving endangered forests; and improving indoor air quality by reducing the use of toxic chemicals are a few of the big ones. And as innovative designers become increasingly tuned in to the desires of the consumer who is as style savvy as she is environmentally conscious, options abound for outfitting your pad with supremely cool gear that doesn't forget the planet.
Sound too good to be true? Economically, it may be. Though rapidly growing, green design is still a relatively small segment of the furniture market, which often results in hefty price tags for even simple pieces. The solution? Start slowly.
Just as it's impossible to instantly transform every piece of your wardrobe into organic cotton, it's unrealistic to quickly fill your home with furniture crafted from sustainably harvested wood. While you're saving up for the big-ticket items like the Isabella Bed from RC Green — made from Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-certified wood and natural latex — you can score furniture that is eco- and wallet-friendly by seeking out previously owned pieces. Reusing is always the greenest option as it doesn't require new materials or the energy required for manufacturing, and it keeps another item out of the landfill. You can go the craigslist.org or freecycle.net route or you can hunt for vintage and antique items.
But if you've got the green to purchase new green pieces, keep these tips in mind as you shop:
Look for furniture made from reclaimed materials. Houses, kitchen tables, pianos, baseball bats — think of all the wood that is used to make things each day and then think about all the scraps left over from construction and manufacturing and the landfill waste from discarded wood items. Instead of using new wood to make dining room chairs and beds and bookshelves, some green designers are turning to wood that's already in play. NYC-based RG Furniture Design turns lumber from historic buildings under demolition in New York City into striking tables, benches, shelves and lamps.
Seek out furniture made from FSC-certified wood. We need trees. Lots of them. They produce oxygen, absorb carbon dioxide, and help to keep the planet cool, among several other very commendable attributes. Purchasing furniture made from wood sourced from sustainably harvested forests helps to ensure that many trees will be with us for a long, long time. The Forest Stewardship Council is the biggest certifier. Look for its seal of approval before investing in an eco-friendly piece of furniture. Check out Woodshanti's stunning FSC-certified computer desk.
Purchase furniture made without toxic chemicals. Your couch may look harmless, but unless you know exactly how it was manufactured, there's a good chance that it's off-gassing (emitting substances into the air) harmful chemicals into your home. The most common off-gassed substances are VOCs, or volatile organic compounds, which actually sound as scary as they are — they've been connected to cancer and birth defects — and can be found in substances like formaldehyde, flame retardants, finishes, adhesives and foam cushions. Check out the Brave Space Hallow Coffee Table with low VOC adhesives and a nontoxic finish.
Royal College of Art graduate (UK) Cristian Zuzunaga has devised a fabric based on a 'pixel' concept, which is being produced by Danish manufacturer Kvadrat and sold through Moroso.
Every working day for the past 20 years, Suresh Kanwar, a civil engineer in Chandigarh’s Forestry Department, has been sitting on the same battered wooden chair, an object he said had “no beauty” even if it was, “for office use, very comfortable.”
Hazarding a guess as to its value, he suggested 400 rupees, or about $10, “perhaps, at a junkyard.”
A pair of chairs identical to Mr. Kanwar’s, instantly recognizable to collectors as Pierre Jeanneret teak “V-chairs,” will go on sale at the auction house Christie’s in New York this month with a reserve of $8,000 to $12,000.
A handful of antique dealers from around the world have become regular visitors to government junkyards in Chandigarh, the experimental modernist city about 150 miles north of New Delhi, conceived by the architect Le Corbusier in the 1950s. There they buy up disused stocks of furniture that was specially created by Corbusier’s colleagues to equip the new city.
The disappearance of large quantities of these distinctive, ultrafunctional tables and chairs — most of them designed by Mr. Jeanneret, Le Corbusier’s cousin, for the city’s government offices, courtrooms and colleges — has begun to alarm architects and some officials in the city.
Rajnish Wattas, principal of the Chandigarh College of Architecture, was stunned when he saw the catalog for a sale at Christie’s New York last June, titled “Chandigarh.”
“We found out that we were sitting on a pot of gold, quite literally,” he said. “But the dealers had realized much earlier that there was big money to be made.”
The process by which the furniture left the city’s offices and made its way to New York and Paris reflected a broader ambivalence among the public toward Le Corbusier’s heritage in Chandigarh and widespread official neglect of his work.
There was nothing illegal about the purchase by foreign dealers of the furniture, much of which was being thrown out or sold by the city’s administration. But very belatedly, heritage experts in Chandigarh are lamenting the loss of a vital part of the city’s original design.
“It is a tragic misunderstanding,” Mr. Wattas said. “I wish the scandal had come out earlier and then maybe we could have clung on to much more than we have now.” Last fall, he founded Chandigarh’s Heritage Furniture Committee, in an attempt to archive the remaining stocks of the Jeanneret designs. But little progress has been made.
Mr. Jeanneret, who later took over from his cousin as Chandigarh’s chief architect, was passionate about creating furniture that echoed the style and ethos of the surrounding buildings.
“There were no furniture shops, no carpet shops, so the architects designed their own,” said M. N. Sharma, an architect who worked closely with Le Corbusier. “The furniture Jeanneret designed is naturally in the same spirit as the city, in the same school of thought. It is functional, and used locally available material and craftsmen.”
Mr. Jeanneret paid extraordinary attention to detail, designing lampposts, municipal light fixtures, manhole covers, even the pedal-boats in the huge artificial lake at the heart of the city. He designed several versions of the basic chairs, with modifications for more senior bureaucrats, like leather backs and armrests instead of simple cane. Local workshops were commissioned to turn them out, and thousands were made.
Despite the striking simplicity of the chairs’ design, few of the city’s employees gave the furniture a second glance.
Gradually, as the furniture fell into disrepair, it was thrown into government storerooms and occasionally auctioned “for peanuts,” Mr. Wattas said, usually to local carpenters who broke it up and reused the increasingly expensive teak. “People wanted new and glossy stuff: synthetic leather, Scandinavian design, metallic furniture.”
India’s export laws classify antiques as objects more than 100 years old, which made it easy for collectors to take the objects out of the country.
A Paris dealer, Eric Touchaleaume, first came to Chandigarh in 1999, and started buying at government sales. Much of his collection was auctioned at Christie’s in New York last summer: a manhole cover, designed by Mr. Jeanneret, molded with the map of Chandigarh, was listed with a reserve of $20,000, alongside daybeds, stools, armchairs and bookcases.
In an e-mail message from his Paris showroom, Galerie 54, he said that such was the level of neglect for Mr. Jeanneret’s designs that disused furniture was being chopped up for firewood. “I always paid on average 100 times more than what the local dealers were offering,” he wrote, adding that he hoped that the attention the New York sale had attracted locally might encourage Chandigarh to value its heritage more highly.
Kiran Joshi, a professor of architecture at the Chandigarh College of Architecture, agreed that the dealers were perhaps not to blame. “It’s not the collectors that were the problem,” she said. “The problem is our perception of heritage. We thought it was junk; our government thought it was junk.”
The city authorities, who are applying for Unesco World Heritage status, have ordered that no more furniture be auctioned, and prisoners in the local jail have been commissioned to start restoring some of the broken pieces.
Mr. Sharma said the disappearance of the furniture was symptomatic of a broader disregard for Le Corbusier’s work.
“There is a general lack of appreciation here of Chandigarh’s architecture by the administration and the general public,” he said. “Truly, I feel very sad.”
Herman Miller’s investments in areas such as energy efficiency have resulted in a 32 percent rate of return according to a case study by Forrester Research (via SeekingAlpha).
According to the study, Herman Miller has already reduced land fill waste by 80 percent, hazardous waste by 91 percent, overall emissions by 87 percent, and water usage by 67percent, while doubling sales to more than $2 billion.
The company uses techniques such as lean manufacturing and the Cradle to Cradle Design Protocol to improve overall efficiency of manufacturing and reduce cost. The company is aiming to be carbon-neutral by 2020.
Herman Miller’s CEO Brian Walker recommends companies that want to green their supply chains should design products with sustainability as a core principle, put the goals on paper and embrace transparency and meaningful metrics.
The ancient Japanese believed that gods lived in all things, whether animate or inanimate. Talking to a wall was not an idle act, but actually a kind of soul-searching. And usually, the wall talked back.
Now the designer of a table and set of chairs says his furniture embodies that philosophy.
The furniture is called fuwa pica, which loosely translated means 'soft and flashy'. It senses people's presence, then gradually changes colour accordingly.
The interactive set, which could be in shops, airports, museums, or bars within a year or two, uses technology to extend people's emotional state into a room that may be devoid of ancient ideas.
"We want modern people like us to remember that there was an interaction between people and furniture," says Ichi Kanaya, assistant professor atOsaka University.
In a typical scenario, a person might walk into a room furnished with fuwa pica. He or she might place a memento or favorite item, let's say a blue vase, on the table and sit on one of the chairs. Gradually the chairs begin to change from white to blue.
Air-cushioned chairs
Kanaya and his team, working out of the university's Mongoose Studio, designed a round table that has a computer and built-in LCD display and four air-cushioned chairs.
The table and chairs are linked to each other via a wireless signal. Colour sensors in the table scan objects placed on top to determine their hue and then the computer sends a signal to the chair to match the colour of the object.
The brightness is controlled by pressure sensors inside the chair. These measure the air pressure and send that information to the table's computer. The higher the pressure, the brighter the colour.
"It's a wonderful demonstration of integrating high-tech into lifestyle experiences," says Jonathan Cagan, professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon Universityand co-author of The Design of Things to Come.
"It focuses on the pleasure that people receive from the interaction, not on the technology."
Groaning under the weight
Chair colour is not only dictated by objects placed on the table. A casual sitter will also elicit a response from the 'chair gods'.
"For example, imagine that a heavy person sat on the sofa. The sofa would change its colour from white to red, as if the blood pressure was rising high," says Kanaya.
The thing Kanaya and his team need to be sure of, says Cagan, is that the furniture behaves consistently and seamlessly and that the technology is robust. You don't want to have to reboot your chair.
"As soon as it fails, the experience of the chair fails," says Cagan.
Whether embedded with technology or not, all furniture is breathing and talking, say the researchers.
If you cannot hear it, ancient Japanese philosophy might suggest you need to inspect the silence inside yourself.
icola Enrico Stäubli is a self-described "architect, designer and bike messenger" based in Switzerland who believes that modern design should be affordable for everyone. So Stäubli started www.foldschool.com, a Web site providing free patterns and instructions for making your own foldable cardboard furniture for children.
All you need to make Stäubli's origami-like creations is some corrugated cardboard, adhesive, a ruler and cutting tools. The patterns can be downloaded from his Web site and printed out on your home printer. (Make sure your paper tray is loaded: the chair pattern alone fills 54 sheets.) Once the pages are printed, you join them together with tape to form one large pattern, and use spray glue to adhere the pattern to the cardboard.
(You can buy sheets of cardboard or just use old boxes.) Then you cut along the lines, fold, assemble and glue.
The Web site includes plans for a stool, rocker and chair. The pieces are really attractive, and can be customized by your child using crayons or paint. (Just don't decorate the seat or back if you want to keep clothes clean.) Construction time takes an estimated 3½ to 5½ hours, depending on the complexity of the piece, making this a good project for a rainy day (or week).
This is alsoenvironmentally friendly furniture, since the pieces can be recycled when your child outgrows them. And if you like the way your furniture came out, you can send a photo to Stäubli--he posts pictures of readers' chairs on the Web site.
Though technically a rocking chair, we think "rocking & rolling chair" might be a more appropriate moniker for this spacey concept. If the "Rocking Wheel Chair" concept by student designer Mathias Koehler doesn't bowl you over, we don't know what will. (via TreeHugger.)
Though it looks like something that would be more at home in a cheesy, futuristic, over-the-top alien flick, we love the way the "rocking" functionality has been integrated with the overhead reading lamp we could also see "amusement part ride at home" added to the multi-tasking list of functions it provides. If this rocker ever makes it to production, we'd recommend one of two additions: either a five-point harness or someplace to store a barf bag.
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