Dezeen Magazine

Joel Blanco’s Messless furniture encourages users to welcome messiness in the home

Joel Blanco's Messless furniture encourages chaos in the home

This range of furniture by designer Joel Blanco is designed to bring messiness into people's homes.

Messless consists of two pieces of furniture, each with a chunky frame structure made from a hard foam coated with orange-coloured polyurethane rubber.

Thinner lengths of a softer, more flexible foam are intertwined through the inside of each piece, wrapping around the structure and passing through it in a seemingly random order.

Joel Blanco’s Messless furniture encourages users to welcome messiness in the home

These more malleable components create a disordered net or lattice that allows objects like clothing to be supported inside, while the straighter, harder pieces of the frame can be used as shelves. The effect is intentionally chaotic.

"Messless challenges the idea of order," said Joel Blanco. "It does not facilitate organisation in the traditional way. What many would call disorder is the only possible order in this furniture."

"We will always find our ways to create a mess, it's in us, I just try to find more ways to embrace it and the possibilities are endless," he added.

Joel Blanco’s Messless furniture encourages users to welcome messiness in the home

In the taller, rectangular cuboid form, which acts as a wardrobe, these more malleable pieces are orange and pink. In the shorter, square 'side table', they are orange and blue.

Blanco, who is now based in The Netherlands after completing a masters at Design Academy Eindhoven, began developing the project after being invited to participate in a group exhibition called Choque at Galería 6mas1 in Madrid.

Joel Blanco’s Messless furniture encourages users to welcome messiness in the home

Blanco told Dezeen that the idea came from his observation that mess represented time spent in a space.

"I was thinking about the conditions that create a home and came to the conclusion that a home is not made from the objects or furniture within the space, those could be easily found in a hotel, but from time – when we tidy our rooms, we are literally erasing the signs of time in them," he explained.

"You could say that we feel at home in the place that we can drop our mess."

"Creating this structure that makes the mess be the order, the order will be any mess you create," continued Blanco. "You could drop all your stuff as they fall and make them become part of it in 'perfect' order. In other words, it creates a messless space."

Joel Blanco’s Messless furniture encourages users to welcome messiness in the home

Blanco's work is typically lighthearted in its presentation. For his graduation project in 2017 he created a giant donut to "confront us with the silliness of life" while asking questions about the value of objects and the role of the designer.

"All my work has a lot to do with semantics, I play with presuppositions and implications in different contexts," he said. "Even if you don't get a full grasp of it, you can still enjoy it for what it is."

The Choque exhibition runs until 31 July 2018 at Galerí 6mas1, Calle Piamote 21, Madrid. Other designers showing their work in the exhibition include Sander Wassink, Max Enrich and Miguel B.

Other designers who have experimented with creating furniture out of rubber-coated foam including Jo Nagasaka, who created a collection of spongy seats inspired by bondage techniques for Milan design week 2014 and Martijn Rigtersm who created a rippled sofa by forcing a long block of the material through the space between four hot pieces of wire.

Photography is by Baslab.