Ohio Design

It’s not clear what the future condition of our built environment will be, there are various propositions both dystopic and utopic that float in and out of our cultural vision. One proposition is that the built environment will in fact be a grown environment whether it be the rise of rapid prototyping machines offering mass customization as they sinter, print and grow the objects of our lives—right in front of us on our desk or counter top— or genetic recoding and self assembly systems such as nano-technology . A curious and somewhat unexpected addition to this growing process is Jannis Hülsen Xylinum project which grows the skin of a stool from a bacterium. Xylinum is the name of the bacterium which produces an artificial cellulose material. This bacterium counsumes sugar and builds a cellulose fibre structure around any given form, or so it says on Jannis’s website.

Whether it be the crystallization of seating by Tokujin Yoshioka (interesting interview here) or the growing of a new human jawbone there seems a growing (excuse the pun) trend towards this most alternate yet natural way of construction.

More images after the jump

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The work of Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad is difficult to categorize, and that in part is what draws me to it. He uses furniture, community, photography and observation to create insight into our contemporary world and the societies conditions. Looking for opportunities to lightly intervene and create delight his most recent project “Church Street Bench” will be on display at the Serpentine Gallery in London this week.

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Late last year OHIO was commisioned to produce bar seating for the new restaurant at the New York Historical Society, aptly named Caffé Storico. The steel based upholstered seat stools in an eye popping canary yellow were a wonderful temporary burst of color in the studio prior to shipping. Now we can see them in context, providing a bright and sunny element to the beautifully crafted space, all make sense in the world.

The restaurant is reviewed over at ZAGAT

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Late last year, Philippe Malouin, a Canadian designer residing in England, put together some items for a show curated by the online design magazine and blog DEZEEN. The work—a series of waxed concrete shapes— offered an opportunity to see the “container” as more than just a vessel. The segments sat together as a family of individual objects convened for a temporary purpose. The notion that an object’s function is mutable is an ancient theme but that its form can be mutable as well seems a more contemporary suggestion and one that offers a potential for new ways of seeing the objects in our lives.

More images and a short video after the jump.

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We recently had the pleasure of meeting Mark Adams the owner and CEO of Vitsœ whilst he was in town for the Dieter Rams show Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams which recently came to an end at the SFMoMA. A charming man with a steadfast mission of bringing the highly practical and eternally elegant 606 Universal Shelving System to the world. Designed by Dieter Rams for the (now UK based) Vitsœ company in 1960, the 606 is seen by many as a timeless classic which looks as good loaded with objects as it does without. Mark Adams has made it his task to increase efficiency in the production of the shelving, refining systems and bringing the price to within more peoples reach, and for that we are deeply grateful.

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Nicolas Le Moigne’s designs for the Swiss company Eternit have been on the market and impressing me for some time, the material itself is quite beautiful and allows for thin walled construction relative to other concrete products. His Ecal Stool and Ecal Table have recently been joined by his Trash cube, the making of which is captured here in this video. As well as designing for Eternit and others, Le Moigne has been working with London based gallerist Libby Sellers, who has a show featuring current work and limited edition pieces.

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At OHIO we’ve been a passionate supporter and user of managed forest timber well before such criteria became the standard it is today. We’ve always recognized that as furniture designers and makers we are converting raw lumber into items for the home that will last a life time, and in doing so we are revaluing the material to a high degree. So its with great interest we see that researchers from Woods Hole Research Centre with the help from the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Geological Survey as they have been mapping the tree and shrub population of the U.S.

Over the last 6 years Josef Kellndorfer and Wayne Walker have been plotting and charting every 30 metro square of land across the whole continent to bring an incredibly detailed observation of the current condition.

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It’s a simple premise but I just clicked on the word WOOD on the Arch Daily blog which has brought up all the articles that have been tagged with the word WOOD. Please enjoy.

Over the last year there’s been a whole lot of hard work going on next door, our neighbors Southern Pacific have been building a brewery (how pleased are we). We’ve seen them digging out floors, putting on roofs and building walls as they’ve converted the old Mission factory unit into brewery, restaurant, bar and beer mecca. We were very pleased to be involved in designing and producing the seating, all told 110 seats (stools and chairs) for you to choose from as you seat hop around the 11,000 sq ft space

They openend their doors last Friday and we’ve been there ever since, if you’d like to join us Friday late afternoon is a good time for us.

620 Treat Avenue, San Francisco
Sunday-Wednesday 11am-Midnight
Thursday, Friday, Saturday 11am-2am

More images of the space and some of us making the pieces in the workshop

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