Steve Badgett of the design/art/architecture collective Simparch tipped me off to Dutch furniture designer and architect Gerrit Rietveld’s set of chairs built out of crates, done back in the 1930s. As Rietveld put it,
“A piece of furniture made of high-grade wood and manufactured completely according to traditional production methods is transported in a crate to avoid damage…no one has ever ascertained that such a chest embodies an improvised, highly purposeful method of carpentry…there must therefore at long last be someone who chooses the crate rather than the piece of furniture.”
You can bet our next book will have some Rietveld inspired DIY designs. In the meantime, for the industrious makers out there, the chair above would be a cinch to back-engineer with pallet wood. Rietveld sold pre-made kits for the volk to assemble themselves. You can still buy a crate chair kit for $450 produced by Rietveld’s grandkids, but a few hours with a sawzall, drill and some screws and scrap will be De Stijl in no time.
A special thanks to daddytypes.com for some info on this–oddly, Greg at daddytpes seems to share my interest in hippie building manuals and furniture made from junk.
$450 for a chair i have to put together myself? hmm, seems kind of scary in this economy to be charging that much for a wooden chair…sorry, just being honest.
Glad you provided that link to De Stijl. I thought it was some sort of love child of DeWalt and Stihl…which would probably also make for a good chair.