What is happening in the murky video clip to your left? To be honest, I’m not entirely certain. All I can tell you for sure is that this is a preview of the new work by Joris Laarman Lab to be exhibited at Friedman Benda Gallery, in New York, beginning Friday.
Laarman is the young Dutch designer best known for creating the Bone Chair and Bone Chaise, among other bone furniture. For those limited-edition pieces, he used computer algorithms and a trademarked CAD casting method to mimic the growing patterns of bones in bizarre-looking aluminum or polyurethane seats.
His new work includes the Half Life Lamp, which again tries to imitate a biological process in a manufacturing setting. This is a case where it may be best to let the designer speak for himself. Here’s an excerpt from a statement by Laarman:
This lamp Half life – it is half made of living organism and half made of non living material recently died. It was born on February 23 in a Dutch tissue culture laboratory. On the video Half life radiated brightly when it was in healthy conditions. The cells responsible for the emission of light in the hood of the lamp originally stem from a Chinese hamster. In 1957 these CHO cells were isolated from a hamster’s ovary and kept alive as a cell culture for research purposes. In the 1990s this cell line was enriched with the fire fly’s luciferase gene. Ever since than these hamster cells glow in the dark in presence of luciferine. According to present state of knowledge in the life science the development of bioluminescence systems in living organisms occurred naturally about 20 or 30 times in evolution. Well known examples of bioluminescence are found in bacteria, fire flies, and jelly fish.
So the above video illustrates this bioluminescence. And the final result? Read more…
For more than three decades now, two bright-orange Panton Chairs have graced my apartments in New York City. They started out in the living room, then migrated to the bedroom, and now they’re my dining chairs, to be seen clearly from every angle of my tiny downtown loft. And I love looking at them—their shiny, smooth, sensual plastic forms, their striking Sixties color, their generous seat pans from the front, sleek profiles from the side, and humanoid bottoms from the back please my eye endlessly. Believe it or not, I also enjoy cleaning them—going over the smooth plastic with a damp cloth, then buffing it dry is a satisfying moment, in contrast to my other furniture, which needs vacuuming, dusting, and sometimes toxic stain removers. My Pantons, in fact, stand in defiance of complex maintenance. They are truly Modern chairs in this regard too. And reports to the contrary, my Pantons did not throw guests across the room, break under them, or in any way cause discomfort or bodily harm to anyone. As far as I’m concerned they’re ergonomically, sculpturally, materially, and aesthetically perfect.
As someone who sometimes teaches design history, I also appreciate the chairs’ breakthrough design and materiality, product engineering, and manufacturing methods. The Panton, after all, is the first chair made of one piece of material, a process that took many years and many trials to develop and perfect, starting in the early 1960s. Knowing these historic facts also increases my appreciation of the chairs. And understanding that many trials and errors go into innovative products reminds me that design breakthroughs are not about “aha!” moments, but a sustained commitment to an idea. Read more…
New York City is one of the few places where it is socially acceptable, and even encouraged, to rummage through curb-side trash. There is no shame in this. All New Yorkers know someone who has found a treasure on the curb: a rare first-edition book, say, or a good-as-new couch. The question is inevitably the same: “Who would throw this out?”
For the next two days, Blu Dot is honoring this cherished urban pastime with the Real Good Chair Experiment. In collaboration with mono, Blu Dot will place chairs all over the city, free for the taking. But there is a slight catch: most of these chairs, valued at well over $100, are GPS-enabled. Blu Dot will use the devices to track the chairs’ voyage for a documentary debuting this December, to mark the one-year anniversary of the company’s Soho store.
But don’t worry: GPS or no, if you happen to stumble across one of the chairs, it’s finders keepers! The rest of us will have to be content to track the chairs’ progress at realgood.bludot.com.
The Aeron Chair has about 200 parts—all of which have to be analyzed to determine its carbon footprint. Photo: courtesy Herman Miller
There’s a reason why big companies are almost duty bound to take the lead in sustainable design. To get a handle on the complexity of the task—whether it’s designing a zero-energy building system, or truly closing the loop on a task chair—requires time, money, and expertise. Recently I spoke to Gabe Wing, Herman Miller’s Design for the Environment manager, about the unique challenges of achieving carbon neutrality for products.
Is carbon neutrality for products even possible and, if it is, what has to be done to get there?
We’ve been working in this area for several years. With products, there are some pretty significant challenges to approaching carbon neutrality. The first thing you have to do is determine how much energy is used to assemble and extract all the raw materials from the ground through your production and delivery. Then you need to look at how you handle end-of-life disposal. To go into that process is a significant endeavor and the best way to do that today is through some proprietary software packages. Read more…
Sixty years in, Vladimir Kagan has found something new. Kagan, the furniture designer whose signature forms—organic and sinuous—made him an important figure in midcentury Modernism, this month unveils a new line of furniture built entirely in fiberglass. It’s the first time the designer’s worked in the medium, but, according to Kagan, the effort fits an aesthetic he’s played with throughout his career; cast from full-sized clay molds, the chairs retain the fluidity of his original designs. The best thing about working in a new medium? “I have the great flexibility of being very animated and sculptural,” says the octogenarian. “It’s liberating.”
It’s not every day that recent design-school graduates get to see their work showcased in finished residences, but Pratt students will get that chance soon, thanks to a collaboration between the university and the New York-based developer Hudson Companies. More than 90 students, faculty, and alumni from the institute will display their furniture, textiles, lighting, and an assortment of other home furnishings in two model apartments designed by Rogers Marvel Architects at Third + Bond—a 44 unit, townhouse-style development in Carroll Gardens that mixes luxury condominium housing with environmental design (the entire project’s on track to receive LEED Gold and Energy Star certifications). Inside the apartments, prospective buyers will find everything from teapots to first aid kits, all Pratt-made, in an arrangement curated by Anthony Caradonna, an alum and professor at the School of Architecture. It’s student meets teacher, academic meets commercial, on display at 115 Third Street beginning next week.
Check out more photos of the Third + Bond interiors after the jump. Read more…
Images: Nick Rochowski/courtesy Andy Martin Associates
In the late 1940s, Gio Ponti embarked on a decade-long experiment in super-lightweight furniture design that resulted, in 1957, with his Superleggera chair for Cassina, which weighs a mere 1.7 kilograms (or about 3.75 pounds). At this year’s 100% Design exhibition,which just wrapped up in London, a designer named Andy Martin released an homage to Superleggera that attempts to recreate Ponti’s chair without the horizontal braces he used to support the legs. Read more…
If the end of summer and the return of crushing workloads has got you feeling down—that is, if you’re lucky enough to have a job!—then may we recommend a nap in one of Patricia Urquiola’s new leather seats for Moroso? More than a year and a half in the making, the so-called Bohemian series features a smooth fiberglass shell overflowing with softly pillowed upholstery. Mmm, so soft and overflowing… Real bohemians wish they had it this good. Of course, this kind of luxury doesn’t come cheap; prices range from just over $6,000 for a basic armchair (left) to almost $24,000 for the most decked-out version of the sofa. If you can’t afford one yourself, then maybe drop a hint to your psychiatrist?
View more photos of the Bohemian series—it includes a pair of armchairs, a chaise longue, a sofa, and an ottoman—after the jump. Read more…
When Jim Hackett, Steelcase’s CEO, and James Ludwig, the company’s VP of global design, invited us—panelists and moderator—to dine at Wright’s restored Meyer May house, I felt my spine tingle. On the evening before the September 10th symposium, which focused on what today’s designers can learn from the master, I was thinking of how uncomfortable sitting in those stiff chairs would be. But instead we were all pleasantly surprised and grew to understand that Wright knew exactly how to bring people together.
With Jim and James seated at either end of the table and functioning as family patriarchs, the setting turned us into a lively group, willing to express opinions, argue (collegially, if heatedly at times), exchange ideas, and come away feeling that each of us had something to add to the discussion. Though the food, prepared with local produce, was delicious and the service courteous, we felt that it was Wright’s design that made it all work. Read more…
The Italian manufacturer MDM World announced this morning that its Estrema chair, designed by Massimiliano Della Monaca, has been certified by the folks at Guinness World Records as the (drum roll, please) World’s Lightest Chair. Made from a single layer of carbon fiber, Estrema weighs a mere 1.36 pounds. That is indeed very light. By comparison, Frank Gehry’s aluminum Superlight chair, for Emeco, weighs 6.5 pounds. Heck, some issues of Metropolis weigh more than 1.36 pounds. Despite its light weight, the chair can support about 220 pounds—impressive, but probably not enough for widespread adoption in the States, where the average adult male tips the scales at 190 pounds.
For more than three decades now, two bright-orange Panton Chairs have graced my apartments in New York City. They started out in the living room, then migrated to the bedroom, and now they’re my dining chairs, to be seen clearly from every angle of my tiny downtown loft. And I love looking at them—their shiny, smooth, sensual plastic forms, their striking Sixties color, their generous seat pans from the front, sleek profiles from the side, and humanoid bottoms from the back please my eye endlessly. Believe it or not, I also enjoy cleaning them—going over the smooth plastic with a damp cloth, then buffing it dry is a satisfying moment, in contrast to my other furniture, which needs vacuuming, dusting, and sometimes toxic stain removers. My Pantons, in fact, stand in defiance of complex maintenance. They are truly Modern chairs in this regard too. And reports to the contrary, my Pantons did not throw guests across the room, break under them, or in any way cause discomfort or bodily harm to anyone. As far as I’m concerned they’re ergonomically, sculpturally, materially, and aesthetically perfect.
If the end of summer and the return of crushing workloads has got you feeling down—that is, if you’re lucky enough to have a job!—then may we recommend a nap in one of 
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