“Today we are designing and building things that will have a longer shelf life both aesthetically and functionally,” says David Pierce in The Wall Street Journal’s article Simpler Style Sit Better With Tech Firms out today!  Shout outs to Bay Area’s tech culture, including our recent projects with Dropbox, Inc. and SoundCloud.   Great perspective on what’s to come – check it out.

Exciting  week here at OHIO – check out these “behind the scenes” images from our Contract Furniture photo shoot.  We’re justas thrilled as you are, OHIO fans.  More to come of course.. sneak peak after the jump.  And don’t forget to check back soon for the unveiling of OHIO Contract.

OHIO Contract & Neo-Utility

OHIO Contract. Coming Spring 2012

Much lauded and rightly so for his undulating interpretation of traditional boat building techniques, Matthias Pliessnig is bringing a fresh perspective to craft in the early part of our 21st century. The work represents hundreds if not thousands of hours of hand crafted labor and is a physical rendition of what current computer aided design and specifically parametric modeling brings about in minutes. This shows a vision of 21st century craft as a merging of technology and the hand which is counter and altogether more compelling

Environmentally friendly and beautifully sleek in style.  These items are one of a kind and show how versatile cork can really be, not only as a material but also as an elegant piece of furniture.

Design studio DMFD realizes how promising of a material cork can be for any for any sustainable design.  They took waste from the bottle stopper industry and put it back together making not only gorgeous pieces of furniture but also pieces that are apparently very comfortable to relax in.

The Cortica chase lounge is free standing and balanced while curved like a wave. The flexibility and feel of the material allows anyone to sit comfortably and rock gently back and forth.

Aside from the chase lounge DMFD has also created a few other pieces that are equally as stylish and appealing to the eye using the same sustainable ideas.

Discovered at Inhabitat  

Mischer Traxler augments the ordinary with his series Relumine by creating a sort of notional narrative between a series of incandescent table light fixtures and pairing them through the medium of fluorescent tubes. It’s almost a type of gene splicing of old technology, bringing new form to that which is soon to be seen as obsolescent.

Dan Koeppel explains in his recent article for Wired, “Abandoning incandescent bulbs means abandoning fire as our primary light source for the first time in human history.” L.E.D. also means that the bulb and shade relationship that has dictated lighting to such a degree from the first Edison lamp is no longer going to be the ruling form factor of lighting. Surfaces, edges even whole objects can themselves become light emitting with no fear of being burnt from the source.

The future is, as they say, bright.

Discovered at Dezeen

Remember as a kid when your teacher would have you make projects out of random materials found in your home? They would have you glue it altogether to come up with what you may have thought was to coolest thing since sliced bread.  Well a Singapore based studio, Formistry, took those common materials and designed lamps that really are the coolest things since sliced bread.

Buttons, rice, bamboo, glass, and ratten are such simple things that we see and use on a regular basis.  It is not often that one would expect to see them assembled in a way that would create overhead and table lamps as well as tea lights playing with how the light is shown through.

The button lamp in particular is a fascinating concept in terms of how the organization of layered buttons creates different intensities of the light depending on your angle of view.  They were carefully placed and organized in a specific pattern for that sole reason.

Formistry claims that this was not a difficult project to complete considering that they used such simple materials to develop a commonly used product by almost everyone, a light source.  The materials are very warm and neutral in terms of texture and color.  Formistry saw this in the quality of materials which is how they conjured up the overall idea to develop different types of lighting objects.

Discovered at Designboom

The deconstructing and reassembly of his countries cultural past through the medium of furniture is exquisitely executed by Shao Fan. Shao Fan studied wood carving and porcelain at the art and craft research institute in beijing,  his series of chairs are re-appropriated pieces derived from classical ming style furniture, merged with a contemporary aesthetic of clean, geometric lines. some of which integrate heavy, black, angular shapes which in a way mimic chinese ideograms – ‘it is the fundamental harmony and equality between humanity and nature’ that are aspired here.

Discovered at Designboom

The Metal Office Furniture Company founded in 1912 is celebrating its centenary this year, now named Steelcase it is one of the largest design led manufacturers of contract furniture in the world. Below is an image of one of it’s founding products, a steel waste bin named “The Victor” which was designed to solve the problem of wastepaper bins catching alight due to carelessly extinguished cigarettes. The affordable metal bin was their solution available in four finishes, including Walnut, Oak, Mahogany and olive green, it put them on the path to being where they are today, a global player in the office furniture world. 

The observation of beauty in the everyday has long been a preoccupation of photography and photographers, in many ways the image is a physical manifestation of how they view the world. The Brooklyn based photographer John Cyr and his work are no exception to this rule and his series of photographic development trays are proof that he is an expert in the field. For those of you old enough to remember these artifacts there will be memories of fumbling in the dark, the hue of red light and smell of developer and fixer wafting through your mind right now. For those of you from the digital age, these trays would hold the developing fluid which the photographic paper would be submerged into, magically revealing the image exposed (look it up, or try it at home)

Discovered at Its Nice That