Core77

Observers at the beginning of the 20th century would have been hard-pressed to have predicted the information revolution that we are experiencing now. In their vision, flying cars would clutter our skies, but cellular phones and the Internet would be beyond the scope of their foresight. With this in mind, it seems that the subtitle of Furnish: Furniture and Interior Design for the 21st Century is likely a misnomer. If we lived in the sort of world where the average homeowner of the 21st Century adopted Patrick Jouin's SOLID C1 chair, then the eighties would have been cluttered with objects designed by the Memphis collective. Despite the false prognostication of its subtitle, however, Furnish supplies an inspirational look into the vanguard of industrial design in the early 21st Century.

Furnish collects the diverse output of designers spanning from avant-garde conceptualists like Maarten Baas to established architects like Zaha Hadid. The results range from whimsical to stunning. The book includes is grouped into broad sections beginning with an introduction showcasing a variety of applications for new technologies like Oki Sato's light fixture that's made of a heat sensitive metal alloy, so that the shade literally "blooms" when the light is turned on. A chapter on customization includes many reclaimed objects and one-off designs that are anything but "industrial" design, like Haren Ryan's compositions of reclaimed bits of furniture into vertigo-inducing cubist visions. Little of this work is functional, and could just as easily be grouped into subsequent chapters on limited edition works and conceptual art. Much of this design would be right at home in the installation art wing of the Whitney, but is ill-suited for consumer adoption.

The section entitled "Process + Prototypes" is equally unsuitable for the masses, but some day it might be. This chapter should be of the most interest to any designer looking to create objects for the coming century. Here Furnish truly shines, showing laser-cut flat-pack chairs and rapid prototype lamps with fractal and organic forms that would look at home in the viewfinder of a microscope. These complex products demonstrate the ability of modern manufacturing technology to produce nearly anything a designer can envision. While Bezier spline-influenced blobjects are a modern-day cliche, some of the objects shown in this chapter show just how far this technology can go; and it's an exciting thing to behold.

Furnish is to mass-market design what Parisian couture is to JC Penney. Some of the work presented in Furnish is so beautiful that I could see myself designing a whole home around it, though I doubt that my landlord would let me install Joris Laarman's enormous ornamental concrete radiator in my rental apartment. Other items diverge so thoroughly from the traditional conception of furniture that it would be virtually impossible to put them anywhere in your house.

Ultimately, however, radical design serves a purpose, even if it's impossible to sit on. So while Furnish probably isn't presenting furniture that many people in the 21st Century will own or could come close to affording, the technologies used to manufacture those products and the trends that they presage may continue well into the future. Processes like water jet cutting and assembly methods like laser sintering will allow for the production of goods that were technically impossible to manufacture a few years ago. The very concept of an industrial designer as someone designing for mass production may erode as well. Appendages like parting lines and ejector pin marks may disappear from plastic objects as manufacturing processes change. Further, the next century may witness the erosion of mass production as families purchase CAD design templates rather than pre-made objects, so that their home RP machines can simply print another copy of the fork that they just broke.

In a twenty-first century like that, personalization and limited production runs will likely rule the day, but with any major trend comes a backlash. In that manner, Furnish is sage, presenting not only high-tech manufactured objects, but also a variety of objects focused on craftsmanship and individuality. While few of these deliberately non-functional objects appealed to the industrial designer in me, if everyone gains the ability to print perfect objects at home, anything obviously hand-made may gain a cache better understood by the tailors of Saville Row than by a Ron Arad or Ross Lovegrove.