greg lynn: recycled toy furniture.

While trolling the blogs today I found these re-used toy tables on Dezeen. Designed by California-based architect Greg Lynn, his series of recycled toy furniture won Golden Lion for the Best Installation Project in the International Exhibition at the Vienna Architecture Biennale.

While it’s pretty clear these aren’t recycled toys, I still think this works beautifully as a piece, almost more as an installation. And the idea is still true – you could use recycled toys in this fashion. I guess the line is a little grey, but I don’t care. They look hot. They’re big and shiny and plastic and colourful and have been melted together in a little toy-pyre and made into table. I likes.

anna ter haar: “buitenbeentje” + “a matter of appearance”.

Dutch designer and artist Anna ter Haar has a love of colour, the patience for creating something pain-stakingly different, and a drive to push the boundaries of design, film, and art.

Of her series of altered furniture “Buitenbeentje” (Dutch for “odd man out”) she says “this research is the result of my fascination for everything that differs the normal: the odd man out, the freaks.
Certain appearances that are so ugly and disgusting that they become interesting”. I’m not sure if it’s really weird then that I find these chairs awesomely beautiful.

Like a multi-coloured stalactite, she laboriously drips different hues of polyurethane resin around the rim of a hole she’s cut in a chair or table and removed the leg. As each dripping dries out it hardens, allowing the next layer to continue, until eventually the amputated leg is reformed by the rainbowed resin. The results are organic, beautiful, and completely unique to each work. The series was shown at the international design fair Salone del Mobile in Milan this April.

She’s also got a cool time-lapsed vid that gives us a peek into her process:

In her graduation film project, she collaborated with Cris Bartel on an interesting film, paint, collage, video mash-up called “A Matter of Appearance”.

In this great making of vid, you can check out how they did it; first creating the shifting imagery and art work, and then projecting it over their subjects while filming:

Via Design Milk

christian zuzunaga: pixel couch.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again right now, pixels are the shit. Whether it’s the colour-filled pixellated print art from the too-awesome -for-words collective EbOY or this little baby right here. Say hello to the Pixel Couch from UK Royal College of Art graduate Christian Zuzunaga.

From an artistic perspective, I love it. The concept behind this is big, but actually looking at it for too long kinda makes my face hurt. I’m not sure I could handle sitting on it each and every day, but I’d want to own it anyway. Maybe I could design and entirely pixellated room in my house, with this couch and EbOY prints all over the walls. It might make your eyeballs explode, but what a way to go…

Via the must-read SwissMiss

adi meirtchak + adva noach: gum pile chair.

Ah, the ol’ gum under the chair. Brings back memories of high school: slouching down in some hard wooden seat mentally preparing yourself for the soul-sucking agony that is, say… physics. Or in my case physics, chemisty, algebra, calculus or any other left-brained pursuit. Except for biology – that was fun because it had animals.

But anyway, you’re in physics and you reach under to grab your backpack only to rub up against some nasty, calcified, Cretaceous-area wad of petrified gum. That’s gross.

Oddly, as in the work of Israeli industrial designers Adi Meirtchak and Adva Noach, if you stick several thousand pieces of gum to the bottom of a chair, it’s art. Don’t ask. It just is.

Via NOTCOT

boex 3d: get the lead out.

Created by Boex 3D Creative Solutions in the UK, this totally functional bench is made up of 1600 individually sprung pencils. Each pencil can be taken out, used, and replaced back in the bench.

I guess there’s some kind of “bed of nails” physical law of weight dispersion thing going on that explains how this all works. What that law might be, I have no freaking idea. All I know is that I would only invite skinny friends to sit on it.

Via Rodrigo Barba

gimme gimme: x3 stacking chairs by marcus moran.

It’s Wednesday and that means it’s time for me to talk about what I’m currently obsessed with. What better way to traverse the rocky terrain of hump day than to talk about some random, usually exorbitant and quite possibly ridiculous thing that I’ll never own but will continuously obsess over?

So every day I walk home down King Street (well, let’s be honest, not every day… some days I take cabs) past Knoll Studio and I stop and press my mittens up against the glass and fantasize about all the sleek, modern, stark looking chairs that I could (and should) have sitting oh-so-casually in my hallway.

Before we take this further, it’s time I reveal that I have an obsession for two things: see through materials and bright primary colours. Which is why I’m thinking of not eating this month so I can buy these:

Say hello to the x3 stacking chair by Marcus Moran for Knoll Studio. Not only are they inspired by the iconic metal grids of sculptor and designer Harry Bertoia’s landmark Diamond Chair… but they’re see through and bright primary-coloured! These are heroin in chair form. Chair nip. If I had a baby, I would sell it for these chairs.

At $331 US a pop, my dream of having four multi-hued x3’s sitting on my patio as I sip mojitos and gaze serenely into the future suddenly seemed a bit more decadent than I’d originally planned. I suppose they’re worth it because each chair is created by “the bi-injection of transparent polycarbonate and a desmopan colored lattice”. Whatever, I want them just for the cute colour names that these babies come in: Tangerine, Sapphire, Lime, Clear Silver, Clear Gold and Smoke. I’ll take two of each!