SHAPESTERS

Check out this lively blog about the fascinating world of industrial design. Key contributors include Ayse Birsel, Steve Prastka, Manuel Saez, Sally Dominquez, and more! Please send us your news and views to shapesters @ sparkawards. com.
 
SERIOUS PAPER PLAY
June 29, 2009 by Sally Dominguez

Paper bags and cardboard boxes, butchers’ paper and newsprint hats.  Paper plates, papier mache and the versatile matchbox, boxes for packing and moving and play-- visionaries like Gehry and Shigeru Ban use it for structure but, whether the blame rests with neat stacking Lego and Lincoln Logs or span-worthy Meccano, most of us don’t consider cardboard as a construction basic.

With around 85% recycled content typically found in corrugated card, the material offers sustainable credentials that many other product and building materials cannot match.  Frank Gehry’s seminal 1969 Wiggle chair, featuring 60 layers of corrugated card “Edge Board” screwed into compression, is a plain sexy investigation of how to achieve strength and sculpture through the opposite layering of corrugations.  Shigeru Ban’s equally groundbreaking use of cardboard structure in halls, office buildings and houses epitomizes economy in use and lifecycle, marries the strength of the helically wound paper tube with simple, repeatable, affordable connection details.  As the architect says, “I don’t like waste”. 


Wiggle Chair

Shigeru Ban’s temporary studio, Pompidou Center

Online a smattering of origami-based modules demonstrates all manner of flat packing structure, like Bloxes, flat packed card blocks that interlock for DIY internal walls and structures.  Swiss architect Nicola Enrico Staubli and his free, downloadable Foldschool designs. Eschewing the asymmetrical fold for the uniform concertina, the patented Liquid Cardboard creations of US-based Cardboard Designs are poetic and “freely transforming” vessels.


Bloxes
More pedestrian in form but super useful, compressed paper panel materials like Paperstone and EcoTop provide a paper-based replacement for pulp boards like MDF, utilizing the density and strength of papers en mass.

The ultimate in DIY cardboard emersion and superior acoustics has to be Mafoombey, a corrugated space both poetic and functional, designed for listening to music as part of the Finnish Habitare Fair 2005 by students Martti Kalliala and Esa Ruskeepää.  In awarding Mafoombey first prize Jasper Morrison commended the design for simply “turning the humble material of cardboard into something so wonderful”.


Mafoombey


AS SIMPLE AS A,B,C... OR NOT
June 12, 2009 by Sally Dominguez

Paid up unexpectedly for an article published yonks ago I decided to shout myself a design treat.  For years I have yearned for an Ray Eames walnut stool. 


Originally designed for the lobby of NYC’s Time-Life Building where they were coupled with leather armchairs, A, B and C in solid walnut have always captured my imagination.  In an exhibition long ago I even tabled my own version in threaded, spun stainless steel sections as an all-weather, industrialized and slightly rustic interpretation.  When Athol, my crusty but loveable old metal spinner died from inhaling decades of metal dust, Australia lost an irreplaceable craftsperson and I lost the only person who could spin stainless back on itself in a close take on Ray Eames’ curvaceous walnut B.  Before then, and more so since, I have wanted an Eames stool.  I always thought I loved B.

I love that this stool works either way up.  I love that its gentle concave is a forgiving cup for any-sized bottom.  I love the abstract references to chess, dumbbells, cogs, knuckles and axles.  So with all that love in my soul I paced into the Mill Valley Design Within Reach to finally take my baby home.

I have never been a fan of the “apple-core-ness” of C so it was a tossup between A and B and when it came down to that – I was stuck.  I tried visually separating the two into a neutral setting.  I tried context, rearranging most of the DWR floor in growing desperation. With about 10 minutes before closing and no plans to exit sans stool I was in a decision-making quandary.   Was it B, my favorite til that point, with its central squashed ball and positive outward curve?  Or the tribal squat of A…….  The ghost of Ray echoed in my head  “You know what looks good can change, but what works works”.   Well, they ALL work Ray…..


Suddenly, what luck!  Random product designer to the rescue.  Male.  Apparently working on a new and tiny portable sound mixer.  Rode a rockstar vintage bike.  And made the observation that B is feminine, A is masculine, and he didn’t care much for C.  My concentration thus broken I looked again at the punchy angles of A… and the deal was done.


What do you think?

  Sally Dominguez, Rainwater Hog LLC
Architect and product designer Sally aims her sharp Australian wit at the design scenes on both sides of the Pacific. Check Shapesters and ASIANLINE for Sally

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