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Monday, June 6, 2011

Fast Furniture: 8 One-Hour-per-Piece Wood Craft Projects


Furniture design can be a long and laborious process of drawing, measuring, thinking and rethinking.
Craftspeople can likewise take up to a lifetime to learn the materials, methods and tools of the trade. A high-end, custom-carved wooden furniture object might take up to years to craft. Or … it can all take place in under an hour, from the designs to the finished product.

Joy van Erven (Holland) and Finn Ahlgren (Sweden) struck upon this unconventional approach to merging art, furniture and speed and formed a designer brand around it aptly titled Godspeed. Starting out small, their early works look a lot like thrown-together sticks – no efficiency, but a calculated effect nonetheless.

In time, their works have grown larger and more complex. Skipping the sketching and design review phase results not only in funky, original-looking pieces – it also leads to a mindset about how to rapidly implement designs without the burdens of over-thinking or perfectionism.

Raw and trash materials make many of their pieces quite eco-friendly works of recycled furniture and decor, on top of their inherent visual interest. The contrast of materials and typologies is impressive or even jarring to the eye, as in the case of the scrap-wood throne and candle holder in the photos above.

While some of the finished (or unfinished) works of craft look like they may have taken all of the allotted one-hour time slot to complete, others are ingenious in their incredible simplicity. This final piece, for instance, is simple a series of boards stuck into the center of an existing industrial wooden object. Between the smooth circular disk and these any-shape-will-work sticks, a rather clever and crafty piece of furniture can be created in nearly no time at all.