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THE
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The Still Summer Edition
FORECAST
Yesterday’s News Tomorrow
Online Everywhere
Sip on some furniture!
By Wessel Stoltz
This past month or so has been a peculiar one in
the furniture world. Of course there were the normal-ish announcements of mavens (in their respective fields, at least) teaming up with manufacturing
giants to create even more cool things for us to
adorn our offices and homes with. Of course there
were the duly deserved announcements of famous
– and posthumous – furniture designers being celebrated and immortalised in pretty picture books,
and of course there were announcements of leading
furniture brands adding another showroom to what
can only be defined as a growing metropolis of furniture showrooms.
But, and this is where things get engrossingly weird,
there were also rumours about furniture so intuitively clever that it now looks after our needs and
wants on our own behalves. And that’s exactly
where we’d like to start this month’s newsletter:
Henceforth there’s no reason for you to drive out to
your allotment where you can tend to the one cabbage and two sticks of baby carrots you managed to
yield. Actually, there’s no need to have an allotment
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CROSSWORD COMMUNITY
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or even a patch of grass at home to grow some grub at
all. Architectural designer Jacob Douenias and industrial designer Ethan Frier have come up with a conceptual line of furniture that grows food right in your
living room. The photosynthetic furniture is filled
with spirulina – a minute edible bacteria (health shops
and spas have banged on about its health benefits for
years…), which the two designers reckon will provide
us with food and massively reduce the environmental
footprint conventional agricultural practices are quite
literally leaving behind.
The custom glass bioreactors use waste heat, light, and
carbon dioxide from a home to feed the spirulina inside. Once there’s a sufficient amount of green slush,
someone can then turn the tap, fill a cup and savour
the spirulina…
In the same vein, the trio Feild Craddock, Akshay
Verma, and Michael-Owen Liston came up with the
ingenious concept (it’s not quite fully realised yet…)
of furniture, in this case a desk lamp, that generates
energy to power itself and because it’s connected to
the internet, it can thereafter automatically sell back
to the grid any surplus energy it produced, earning
you a tidy cheque that’s later posted to you!
In other news – the normal-ish stuff – superstar
architect and man of the moment, David Adjaye
teamed up with Knoll to develop a new collection
of textiles. It’s a surprising mix of patterns and
textures gleaned from African geography, nature,
and culture. Taschen books recently published a
page-turner magnum opus on the designer duo
Charles and Ray Eames, and Vitra has just opened
the newest showroom in ‘Vitra Village’ that solely
shows off their office furniture. The building spans
1700 square metres on the revamped second floor
of Frank Gehry’s 1989 production.
Lastly, two of the most famous chairs are getting a
facelift – the Proust Chair is getting a sibling carved
(by Mendini himself) from a single block of marble
and Arne Jacobsen‘s Model 3107 chair (yep, the one
Ms Keeler made famous…) got a makeover by the
likes of Zaha Hadid et al.
And that, in a nutshell, was what transpired in the
furniture world in the months of June / July.
P3 BEAUTY FEATURES ENTERTAINMENT
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NEWS
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