I’m lucky enough to be on vacation in Cape Town, South Africa, my former home. I picked a good time: it’s the annual Design Indaba, a huge conference that attracts designers and makers at the top of their fields. And, in a third stroke of luck, I got a press pass for today’s session! Up this morning, after ass-kicking animators The Blackheart Gang, Wicked Pixels and Masters and Savant (all South African), were David Boira and Zoe Coombes of design studio Commonwealth, based in Brooklyn.
This is Zoe and David lying on their Fleshless Floor design. These guys look harmless but they create some pretty freaky stuff. In a good way. OK, in an interesting but discomforting way. The Fleshless Floor is made of plywood, with a viscuous, almost translucent pattern mimicking the bubbles formed by the mixture of gas and water.
Here is close-up:
David and Zoe were trained as architects, but architecture is too big, too expensive and has too many laws,” Zoe said at the Indaba. So the pair, who are “obsessed with furniture,” went into small-scale design, using computation to generate finely crafted pieces.
Zoe has written an interesting piece about their work in the Design Indaba magazine.
I’ll post more about them when I get back to NYC – where I’ll hopefully speak to them in person.
