How to grow a chair
Being sustainable need not be boring. It can be poetic, beautiful and even absurd.
As part of the Vitra Design Museum Fellowship in 2010, I participated in a project called ‘The Outdoor Office’ at the Domaine de Boisbuchet in the south of France. In this workshop we were asked to invent interesting solutions that would help facilitate working outside. I took a slightly different course than was expected.
This idea was being explored for the enjoyment that could be held from being outdoors, but it was suggested that this would be a more sustainable way to work because of lower electricity and infrastructure needs.
I was offered a large materials budget to bring my office to life. This offer instantly made me concerned about the long journeys the materials would have to make to arrive at the Domaine de Boisbuchet. Was it worth it for a hypothetical experiment in sustainability? Instead of being excited by this broad premise I found that I was personally torn by it.
Biomimicry is a concept and way of viewing and valuing nature. The term was popularised by scientist and author Janine Benyus in her 1997 book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. It introduces a conceptual framework based not on what we can extract from the natural world, but what we can learn from it.
The core idea is that Nature has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with: energy, food production, climate control, non-toxic chemistry, transportation, packaging, and a whole lot more, so if we look to it we already have our answers (Benyus, 1997.) (2)
So, to inform my project, I used the above principle as a starting point despite the bewilderment of my workshop coordinator and fellow participants. I refused offers of materials and instead like most of the natural world I foraged around the estate. I based my project on the above premise but I used the model as metaphor and philosophy informing my approach as opposed to and exact science — I had re-affirmed to myself that design is a creative activity. Most of my work happens cognitively so, in my though processes, I put nature before my design, before me and before my desire to consume in order to make things. I did this at every stage of my project. Using the metaphor proved to be an interesting way of setting off my imagination.
I was also lucky to be in a creative haven, with the work of many great artists and designers left scattered around and amongst the Domaine de Boisbuchet. The estate exists as an ideas haven in which one great idea continually springs from the next. I merely needed walk around to come up with new angles. My first idea was to build a chair with twigs, I soon realised that this chair would be rather awkward to sit on. My office needed to be comfortable and functional. It then occurred to me that many living things don’t build their homes with extra materials — they dig them out.
I decided to find a hill, and simply hollow out a chair. I shaped it in the form of the most famous office chair of all ‘the Eames’ and filled it with moss for comfort. I even watered it to make sure the grass and moss would grow nicely after I left. Strangely the chair was functional, comfortable, easy to produced without any access materials and thus more sustainable than the other projects. Instead of bringing materials in, I simply took things away and moved them about. Yet, at the same time it was expressive. It conveyed a statement on the absurdity of modern world with our addiction to gadgets, gizmos and ‘work’.
I realised that some of the best, most creative work occurs when connections are made in places where none would seem to exist. When we go to places our normal thought processes do not take us to. By limiting myself in such a way I went down a creative road that I wouldn’t have if I followed my normal paths of reasoning. Since then I have also begun to see connections to nature elsewhere. It seems nature hasn’t only devised naturally sustainable systems but perhaps aesthetic ones also.
Originally published in Poetic Tactics, 2011.
Notes:
1. Boisbuchet is an extensive area of countryside dominated by an old castle that is used for exhibitions. For a number of years, the Centre International de Recherche et d’Education Culturelle et Agricole (CIRECA) has maintained an international cultural centre there in collaboration with the Vitra Design Museum.
2. BENYUS, J. (1997) Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, New York, Harper Perennial
