Love thy table
Why we should care more about our furniture,
Have you really thought about your bedside lamp? About the current of electricity that feeds it, the person who designed it, the machines and hands that assembled it, the millions of man-hours it took for this technology to evolve into what it is today?
Maybe you have. I hadn’t until I spoke to Vancouverbased designer Calen Knauf, who is challenging people to be more mindful of the items that inhabit their worlds.
“We want to create a heightened appreciation for domestic objects,” Knauf says. “We want people to build relationships with them.”
Knauf and Conrad Brown form part of Knauf and Brown, a Vancouver studio that specializes in designing furniture and lighting fixtures. The two recent graduates from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design are challenging traditional notions of sustainability. If we are mindful of domestic objects — that is, if we approach them with a heightened meditativelike sense of awareness — Knauf and Brown believe we will no longer consider them disposable.
“The concept of sustainability was really driven into our heads at Emily Carr,” Knauf says. “But a lot of this ‘sustainability’ felt superficial to us.”
Rather than making recyclable items, or crafting objects out of recycled materials, Knauf and Brown want to create objects that won’t end up in landfills in the first place.
“The longer you can keep something in the hands of the consumer, the less of an impact it has on the environment,” Brown says.
“We just can’t continue to buy crappy things and then replace them,” Knauf adds “If you really love an object, you won’t throw it away.”
Taking this philosophy to a logical extreme, the pair have created the Standard Collection, which consists of a lamp, a mirror and a side table.
Operating a standard transmission vehicle requires more conscious decision-making than driving an automatic car. Likewise, each of the objects in the Standard Collection require more user engagement than their everyday cousins. By being forced to actively engage with these objects in order to use them, Knauf and Brown believe that we can become more mindful of them. With mindfulness comes attachment, love, and thus sustainability, they say.
The duo’s table lamp, for example, does not have a switch.
It consists of a tower of gleaming copper coils and a frosted acrylic vase affixed to an oak base. Within the vase rest two low voltage LED fixtures, like cut flowers with long stems and leather shades. To turn the lamp on, you place the stem of one (or both) of the fixtures on the low-voltage coils to create an electrical circuit. One fixture produces a small beam, the other a floodlight. To turn the lamp off, you remove the fixture from the coils.
Mounted on large acrylic wheels, their drum-like side table is meant to be moved around a room by its small handle. Lift the table’s oak top for a storage compartment lined with quilted calfskin.
A normal side table, after all, is a stationary object that is little more than a place to rest a book or drink. The nomadic nature of this object encourages engagement.
Their tabletop vanity mirror encourages interaction, too. Divided into two parts and resting in an oak frame, one half of the rotating panel is a reflective surface while the other is made of leather with protruding rails to hold mementos and photos. When you want to look at your pretty self, you simply rotate the panel. Done preening? Rotate it back so only the leather half is protruding. Seeing your own reflection thus becomes an intentional act, discouraging furtive subconscious glances.
While Knauf and Brown’s table and mirror are one-off items, their lamp can be purchased through the Apartment gallery in Vancouver. Only five will be made. The price tag might give you something to be mindful of, though — the lamp costs $5,500.
Knauf and Brown’s philosophy is shared by other young designers, including Ivan Hernandez Quintela of Mexico, who has created seesaw and Swiss Army Knife-like tables, as well as students from Switzerland’s ECAL university, who have created a lamp that turns on when its shadow is touched and a fan that is activated by blowing on it. Like Knauf and Brown’s designs, these objects require mindful engagement — that is, one has to be fully aware of their functionality and present in the moment in order to use them.
“A lot of people have a mug in their kitchen that they never want to throw away because they’ve had it for a very long time,” Brown says. “That’s the sort of attachment that we’re trying to create — and we’re trying to do that with things that don’t normally have high levels of involvement.”