Is furniture art? We investigate…

Image credit: NOCC

The answer, of course, is yes. Even the most practical forms of furniture are artistic. Think of the structure, colour, aesthetic, even ergonomic functions and they will have been designed to pleasure your eyes as well as your kitchen/clothes/bottom.

What’s the point of posing such a rhetorical question then, you ask? Well it’s not the yes/no answer that I want to get you lovely blog readers thinking about, but your thoughts on the extent and experimental processes of producing an item of furniture that is beautifully artistic.

Take the Parisian design duo behind NOCC, who seem to embody aesthetic experimentation. When I visited Jean-Christophe Orthlieb and Juan Pablo Naranjo’s (see above, insets left and right respectively) studio in Paris, it soon became evident which words summed up their design philosophy: ‘function, layers, imagination, beauty’.

The voice of art and design

Image credit: NOCC

My favourite NOCC project is the Object of Sound. This project consists of three objects – a vase, lampshade and candle holder – and it’s how these items are made that is truly imaginative and intriguing.  The objects’ profiles are constructed using rapid manufacturing technology and voices. Say what?

Well, while I scratched my head Jean-Christophe gave me a little demo on his Swarovski encrusted Mac (actually, he’d stuck a strip of spare Swarovski crystals on his spacebar during a project with the crystal giants. Nice!).

The process seems relatively straightforward but amazing at the same time: as J-C enunciates ‘vase’ (v-a-arz) a pattern of sound waves form on the screen. This is then shaped into 3D and violà, it becomes the object’s profile. So the object is it’s sound.  He went on to tell me that the ultimate aim of the project is for household objects, like a vase or candle holder, to be ‘unique to each person, with their own voice’.  Pure creative genius, non?

‘One of the things with rapid prototyping technology is that you can do what you want. There’s no mould’, continued Jean-Christophe. ‘You can make shapes that you can’t realise in real life. The vase is ornamental, it’s very delicate, beautiful and natural.’

Mutated furniture = the next step

Image credit: NOCC

Radiation Collection is another NOCC project that can’t fail to catch your eye. J-C said that this project is ‘not about offering possibilities but seeing all possibilities that can be correct’. Their brief was to imagine a scenario where the genes of furniture had been effected and mutated by radiation and to explore the ‘changes in traditional shapes of furniture, as we know them archetypically’.Take a look at the image above, that sketches out ‘all the possibilities’ that they could imagine.

Hypertrophy chair and Outgrowth coffee table:

Image credit: NOCC

The end result? Elongated banister- style armrests, cubbyholed coffee tables and clean, straight white edges that wouldn’t look out of place in the Tate Modern (or my home office…).  NOCC’s advice is to use the hypertrophy of the extended armrest as a newspaper rack or coat hanger. I can see a few pairs of socks drying there too.

Wait, there’s more!

Look at Sym, below. The strong horizontal and vertical lines of the red and white shelving remind me of Mondrian’s non-representational art, or Neo-Plasticism as he coined his paintings.

Image credit: NOCC

Ultimately, good furniture is about function and practicality. But beautiful furniture is about function and what it looks like. Whether you fall in lust with a va-se represented by sound, a mutated chair, or furniture that reminds you of your favourite artist, I defy you to think that furniture and art (in one way or another) is not intertwined.  Contradict me if you can – but I reckon you’ll struggle!