The Design District
Foldschool
I love this. Swiss architect (and bike messenger!) Nicola Enrico Stäubli has designed foldschool, a range of children’s furniture—chair, stool, and rocker—that you make yourself out of corrugated cardboard. He offers the pdf patterns for download for free on his foldschool website with basic instructions on how to get the job done. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the fetishization of some furniture pieces that were originally intended to make design and craftsmanship available to a mass audience (specifically, I’m thinking of the Eames’ work). I’ve also been thinking about the return to the embrace of craft, how it begins with an interest in a little craft-y project and can lead back through time to engaging smart ways of making things we need (and want), and making them well. This project is a friendly invitation to the intersection of these and other concerns about design, making, and the lives of real people that, along with sustainability, are the now and future. This from Stäubli’s philosophy of foldschool:
Foldschool supports craftsmanship as a face-to-face approach to design and brings together product and user the closest possible.
The mindset of foldschool is to restore design to one of its original missions: to provide a product at an affordable price through a smart manufacturing process.
