Nomadic furniture: how to build and where to buy lightweight furniture that folds, collapses, stacks, knocks-down, inflates or can be thrown away and re-cycled.
Most Americans-especially young people-move more and more frequently, over increasingly great distances. Furniture designs to suit these contemporary nomads are developing rapidly; many are improvised under the stress of unexpected living conditions. This book is the first to catalog all the easily available existing designs, and to offer new ideas for compact, flexible, and forthright equipment for homes. Living environments are analyzed in sections on eating, working, seating, sleeping, storage, and lighting. The special needs of older people, children, and babies are answered in concrete and realistic designs. For people who have no previous knowledge of design or building, sketches and specifications are given for making furnishings which are foldable, inflatable, or stackable, and which they can discard later without being ecologically irresponsible. Victor Papanek is a UNESCO International Design Expert who practices the kind of living in which Nomadic Furniture is needed. At present he is Visiting Guest Professor of Design at the Royal Danish Academy of Art in Copenhagen, on leave from the California Institute of the Arts, where he is dean of the School of Design. He studied at Cooper Union, at MIT, and with the late Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin and Taliesin West. He is the author of numerous articles for periodicals, and of Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. James- Hennessy is an industrial designer who earned his Bachelor of Science degree at the Illinois Institute of Technology Institute of Design, where he specialized in product design and computer-oriented design systems. Mr. Hennessy is assistant to the dean of the School of Design at the California Institute of the Arts, where he instructs students in design, mechanics, electronics, and prototype construction. His specialization is the design and construction of devices for the blind and handicapped and for peoples of the Third World.