#HTE

Furniture Designed to Enable Rituals: Jongha Choi’s Cigarette Chair

Designer Jongha Choi has been getting a lot of buzz on his De-dimension furniture pieces, the ones we spotted at Milan. To refresh your memory, here’s what his fold-flat, Shaker-furniture-meets-M.C.-Escher pieces do:

De-dimension from jongha on Vimeo.

Those pieces are polished and function beautifully. But we also found a very different style of piece in his archives, something that’s more contraption than furniture. Check out his amusing Cigarette Chair:

Cigarette Chair from jongha on Vimeo.

While it’s obviously not meant to be practical nor saleable, I love the idea of exposing and enabling the ritual associated with a particular piece of furniture in a particular location at a particular time. Seeing Choi’s creation made me think of:

- Pulling out a chair at your kitchen table in the morning, and a glass of orange juice materializes while the shades open

- Sitting in an easy chair to cause a nearby lamp to switch on while a pair of reading glasses appear

- Sitting in your bed at night causing the shades to close, while a phone charger materializes out of your nightstand

If you created a Cigarette-Chair-like contraption, what would it be, and what ritual would it expose?

http://www.core77.com/posts/53428/Furniture-Designed-to-Enable-Rituals-Jongha-Chois-Cigarette-Chair