FROM ORDINARY TO EXTRAORDINARY
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This post is curated by KNSTRCT in partnership with Jaguar. Experience F-TYPE.
How eight impossibly thoughtful designs are conceptualized from the most improbable everyday materials.
There was a time in all of our lives when we envisioned a rocket ship from a discarded cardboard box, light sabers from the prosaic paper towel roll, and an infra-red Mission Impossible-esque laser security system out of our standard, yawn-worthy electrical tape. Well, at some point along the way, we lost that childlike wonder and imaginative spark. Not these folks. They’re the MacGyvers of the design world. Give them a rubber band, three paperclips and stick of gum and they’ll build you a geodesic dome (Okay, okay, maybe we took that a little too far - but you get the idea). It takes a truly brilliant brain to create sheer design genius from uninspired everyday objects that the rest of the masses discard – we’re talking pencils, tape, cardboard, fabric, and chain link fence.
Enter …. designer Aakash Nihalani, artists Soo Sunny Park, Philip Karlberg, Janet Echelman, Jacob Hashimoto, Nils Völker, François Dumas, and the creatives from M4 Architects. These cardboard crusaders and rope renegades are pushing the limits with disruptive design, shifting our perception of traditional design by utilizing mundane materials in new, innovative ways. Ten bucks says they’ll have you thinking twice the next time you take out your recycling. Could that empty gallon milk jug be an impromptu watering jug? There’s only one way to find out…
Aakash Nihalani – The Taped Crusader
Featuring bold, fluorescent streaks of tape, Aakash’s geometric installations exist on a completely different plane, offering optical illusions that are divinely incandescent.
Philip Karlberg – The Pencil Pundit
A study in smart design, Karlberg’s pencil pin art effectively captures the likeness of iconic figures in a simplistically loose and beautifully abstract manner.
M4 Architects - The Fabric Shifters
For a Moroccan Tagine restaurant in Seoul, Korean design office M4 created a graphic black and white space with a dreamy, cloud-like ceiling. The curvacious white fabric is dotted with lights, and diffusers that cause the clouds to shift and move.
Nils Völker - The Rubbish Beautician
German artist Nils Völker has transformed a bunch of black plastic garbage bags into captivating wall art in his newest installation, Eighty-Eight.
Janet Echelman - From Mesh Fabric To Wind Choreographer
Janet Echelman's floating sculpture She Changes in Porto, Portugal dances in the air because of its lightweight materials of string and mesh fabric.
François Dumas - Broom Re-purposer
In honor of Camper’s 20th anniversary, François Dumas created a temporary shop installation during Paris Fashion Week – using little more than broom handles and cups of paint.
Jacob Hashimoto - The Paper Prep
For the American artist’s first solo show in the UK, he hand-made hundreds of small kite elements from paper, which he then adhered to bamboo frames. In the exhibit space, the kites hang from thin dowels and rest at various levels to create an uneven, fragmented landscape.
Soo Sunny Park – The Chain Link Scuplter
Suspended from the walls and ceiling are thirty-seven individually sculpted units are arranged to appear as twisting mesh of crystals at Park's 'unwoven light' installation that animates the Rice Gallery.
