At this year's Royal College of Art graduate show in London designer Nicola Zocca presents a series of furniture made by shrinking plastic around its joints.
Called Shrink, the exhibited pieces include a chair, bookcase and side table.
The heat-shrink plastic, normally used to protect electrical cables and engineering parts, is simply wrapped around wooden components and heated.
The material shrinks around the wood and forms a rigid joint once cooled.
The Royal College of Art Show Two continues until 4 July.
Here's some more information from Zocca:
Chair, Bookshelf, Side Tables from the series Shrink
It is a series of furniture designed using heat shrinkable tube.
After heating it with hot air, it shrinks from three to six times its diameter.
This material is usually used as protection for electrical cables, automotive and airplane’s parts.After heating, it shrinks and becomes hard enough to be used in new and different ways, for example as furniture's joint.
So just using hot air, after a quick assembly, it's possible to build and fix chairs, bookshelves and tables without using any screws or nails.
Materials:
Ash, oak, steel sheet, heat shrinkable tubes
See also:
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| Heat Shrink Series by Daniel Rawlings |
Light Movement by Noam Bar Yohai |
More furniture stories |
love this! so intuitive.
I’m not convinced by much of it – esp the chair.
However the little three legged tables are just great.
I’d have one in an instant if there was a guarantee that the plastic wont stretch over time.
Love the details. Great job
Rag, go back to the IKEA website.
Personally, I think this is a great idea, well done.
i like it.
but previous dezeen story: http://www.dezeen.com/2009/08/10/heat-shrink-series-by-daniel-rawlings/
?
Great work! they should also show his amazing lights
It’s an amazing job!!! I love it!!! And also nicola’s lamp (I visited his web site)…
Never said it wasn’t a good idea.
Simply that I’m not convinced (by the system).
I use a lot of this stuff for electical work daily and it’s simply not permanently strong enough for this in my opinion.
However if Nicola has found a better version or a new shrinkable material with a lot more interant strength was to be found / used it will indeed make great products.
i wonder how brittle the plastic is?
That chair is just going to slowly stretch to the floor. Nice idea, bad execution.
This is beautifully simple.
Give me a hot-gun and some plastic now!
awesome! this feels right =)
an epic day… for once i take the defence of a young designer! Give this guy a break, we are talking the RCA show, not Milan furniture fair. I visited the show sunday and have to say I was delighted by some of the projects, the simplicity yet energy of this young designers was great. For once at least none of them was pretending to be a super egocentric superstar. I prefer a lot more this kind of embryonal simple projects that dont pretend anything and dont need 10 pages of explanation to a lot of the things that so many wannabe designers just throw out there pretending to be superinventive! good stuff RCA!
god is in details…. i fall yesterday from a starck Bubu stool so he is not yet my design god now