TY-PESH

COME INTO MY WORLD

  • he/they/hey hey

28 | im a gay navajo artist and i draw funny animals
https://ty-pesh.neocities.org/


aysamanra
@aysamanra

Over the weekend I was revisiting Nomadic Furniture by James Hennessey and Victor Papanek (the latter of Design for the Real World fame), which is a book about furniture for people who move around a lot, bouncing from apartment to apartment, city to city, country to country. It goes in a lot of directions: sometimes it's about lightweight furniture, sometimes easy-to-fold-or-deconstruct furniture, sometimes disposable-but-sustainable furniture, and so forth. It's a fun and occasionally hilariously dated mixture of ideas, plans, ruminations, and sometimes even actual PO box numbers of presumably-long-closed manufacturers.

Among its sillier but more memorable and endearing suggestions are these "living cubes". The idea behind them is that you construct a demarcated living space within a larger space, so as you move, you bring not just furniture pieces but actual mini-rooms with you. As the book says,

The great advantage [of these cubes] is that you are then able to completely disregard the real apartment and its shabbyness [sic], into which you then install your "living cube", and use only those life-support functions inherent in the apartment which your cube does not have…

…I admit it's hard for me to imagine that these "living cubes" would actually be conducive to "nomadic" living, because they seem a lot less practical to move around than just a collection of lightweight furniture. (If nothing else, I'm sure I'd trip on those bases all the time.) At the same time, I sort of love them as an idea in the abstract: a complete out-of-left-field answer to the question, "I know I want to move eventually, but I also want to improve the space I'm in right now: how should I do so?"

(The first picture above is a scan from the book, the second is a photograph from a 2013 exhibition about the book which included actually-built versions of a number of objects described in the book.)


TY-PESH
@TY-PESH

tired of being in bad cube


cant wait to get home and be in good cube


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