| Chuck Hoberman works on the sixteenth floor of an old New York Law School building in Lower Manhattan, just a few blocks north of the site where Santiago Calatrava's WTC Transportation Hub was meant to have regularly yawned open its massive steel wings. Hoberman's studio is a bright, high-ceilinged loft, and upon entering, you could be forgiven for thinking you'd stumbled onto a science-center playroom, or maybe Doc Brown's garage. A gallery space in front services as a repository for commissioned pieces: working scale models of, say, Hoberman's Iris Dome--a retractable metal roof created for a 1994 MoMA show and later built for the 2000 World's Fair in Hannover, Germany--or an expanding structure with fabric skin that was made in 1997 for France's Centre Pompidou. Stacked in the corner are boxes of toys, the most famous of which is the Hoberman Sphere, a 1995 invention that has become an icon; a toy that at rest resembles a tight cluster of barnacles and when stretched, balloons into an elegant polyhedron.
Hoberman has long been fascinated by transformable design. If it can collapse, expand, or mutate in some way, Hoberman has made it, or at least mocked it up in his R&D lab-cum-office: adaptive shading roofs, retractable stage sets, expandable medical devices, and, recently, a line of IDEA award-winning rapidly deployable tents for the military consumer manufacturer Johnson Outdoors. When Hoberman first started out, he was interested in the mechanics and math behind collapsibles. As his career has worn on, he says, "I've become more focused on transformable design as something that is functional and application driven." But at the same time, he has never lost sight of the sheer delight that comes from watching someone "take hold of a seemingly solid object, and with a push or a pull, transform it completely."
The idea of collapsibility has held sway over designers' imaginations for years. Think of Polaroid Land cameras, with their accordion-style bellows, Porsche's Carrera sunglasses, with their hinged nosepieces, Antonio Cittterio's folding trolleys for Kartell, Muji's cardboard collapsible speakers, Thomas Heatherwick's Zip Bag for Longchamp, or Poul Kjaerholm's classic folding stool for Fritz Hansen. A 2001 book by Danish Industrial designer Per Mollerup explored every facet of the subject, isolating twelve collapsible principles from nesting to concertina.
And the darling of 2008's Milan Furniture Fair was Cappellini's Stitch chair, a folding aluminum seat by Australian designer Adam Goodrum that snaps shut along a hinged central seam. The designer claims that 25 folded chairs can fit into the space of just one open seat.
Space saving has always played a large part in the appeal of collapsible designs. When Chef'n devised its recent SleekStor line of collapsible colanders and measuring cups, the designers were thinking about "small kitchens, and young people living in condos," says Jonah Griffith, an industrial designer in the lab at the Seattle-based kitchen-gadget company. The line also gave the designers an excuse to explore more applications for silicone, which is heat-resistant up to nearly 500 degrees Fahrenheit and can retain its shape over time, unlike the kind of thermoplastic elastomers that had been used by Chef'n's competitors.
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The Paperclip Lamp
| In recent years, though, as issues of sustainability have taken root, space saving has become not an added bonus but an imperative. Collapsible designs pack tighter and store more easily, lowering freight costs and cutting down on packaging materials. What's interesting about the most recent crop of collapsible products is that sustainability is no longer just a happy byproduct: It's built into the DNA of the products themselves. Take the Paperclip Lamp, a prototype designed by Benoit Collete, a designer at Teague, and David Wykes, a former colleague of Collete who now services as a creative director at Microsoft. Shaped like the fastener that gives it its name, Teague's Paperclip Lamp lies flat on a desk. When tugged, a series of articulated joints lifts the steel tube into a shapely Z. A row of LEDs lines the underside of the upper tube, casting a precise, directional beam that reflects off the lamp's chrome-plated finish, creating a diffuse glow. "You get this magic effect, where you don't know where light is coming from," says Collete. And though the designers say the idea for the lamp came from a desire to celebrate everyday objects, the Paperclip Lamp--like Yves Behar's Leaf light and Koncept's Z-Bar before it--couldn't have achieved its slim profile without current LED technology. Ditto for recently unveiled OLED concepts like a gaming laptop with three collapsible screens, and a Samsung cell phone with a flexible display that can open and close like a book.
Then there's the most famous collapsible product of all: the umbrella. It's long been understood that umbrellas are hell on landfills, if only for the sheer number of them that end up there. But umbrellas, too, recently got an environmentally friendly upgrade courtesy of Dutch designer Gerwin Hoogendoorn. The Senz umbrella is aerodynamically shaped like a cyclist's racing helmet to move with the wind. It began as Hoogendoorn's thesis project at the Delft University of Technology, but has since become a product in its own right, with distribution in the United States by Totes. "I thought, if we can go to the moon, it's strange that we don't have a decent umbrella," recalls Hoogendoorn. He began by collecting broken umbrellas from street corners and trash cans around Delft; after figuring out that umbrellas typically break at the hinge point, where the lower rib is connected to the upper rib, Hoogendoorn decided to eliminate the hinge altogether. The Senz has an outer rib that's hollowed into a U shape, and an inner rib that fits into the outer rib's carved out profile. When tensed, the inner rib slides easily up and down. Hoogendoorn tested his invention inside a wind tunnel at the university, and again by hurling it from a plane in the hands of a trained skydiver. Because the Senz can withstand winds up to 70 miles per hour without breaking--and because it's made from quality materials like ABS plastic and flexible glass fiver--its useful life far exceeds that of a normal umbrella.
Back in Lower Manhattan, Hoberman's recently joined forces with an old friend, Donald Ingber, who is the founding director at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. Collapsibles have long since reached the micro level, and the two men are looking to bo beyond even thin-film nitinols--those minimally invasive collapsible alloys for vascular repair--to create the next-gen technology that Hoberman says will "utilize new principles, new manufacturing techniques, and new science to create new materials" that explore things like tensegrity at the cellular level. No matter how small collapsibles get, however, they'll likely still retain that ability to inspire. As Matilda McQuaid, curator at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum puts it: "The best collapsible structures have the ability to fold and unfold smoothly, and the magical movement of it, the time-lapse photography aspect to it--it's quite extraordinary."
Jill Singer is the managing editor if I.D. Magazine. Her writing on design, fashion, and culture has appeared in The New York Times' T Magazine, New York Magazine, V Magazine, and Print, among others.
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