Image Courtesy of Godspeed
Contemporary furniture design from Italy, Sweden, USA, Brazil and all over the world has fascinated our minds and enriched our lives. Although contemporary is defined by the existing or the occurring at this very moment, many of the designs that are labeled contemporary often describe the style but not the actual conditions in which we live in. What truly is contemporary is the fact that most of what we design ends up in the landfill, as IDEO's Tim Brown suggests.
Image Courtesy of Godspeed
We live in a world where options are plentiful but holding on to those purchasing decisions is absolutely irrelevant. As a rule of thumb, Karim Rashid suggests that anything with a shelf life of 11 months or less —electronics, etc. — should be made out of cardboard, for maximum disposable life-cycle. What these comments informs us is that we seem to have more plentiful waste than we know what to do with. Waste no more!
Image Courtesy of Godspeed
Godspeed, a small conceptual furniture studio based out of Tel Aviv, Israel sees the opportunity of giving life back to these overlooked and undesired materials that end up in trash. Joy van Erven (Holland) and Finn Ahlgren (Sweden) possess an unorthodox mentality and a purposeful choice of materials opposing the high style world of design that lead into a conceptual furniture company that embraces waste and gives it a second life or better said, a life.
Image Courtesy of Godspeed
As the name describes, Godspeed is essentially that, furniture in a one-hour time frame. They have created a unique process where they hurdle the sketching phase and go straight into building the furniture pieces by themselves, similar to a performance art piece where it occurs right there and then. This unconventional process and the raw nature of their materials offers a distinctive and individualized perspective to their work, therefore elevating its perceived and cultural value to its consumers. Their pieces range from takes on baroque, contemporary and plain experimental.
Image Courtesy of Godspeed
Their raw, medium and well done furniture versions captivate our pre-conceived notions of what furniture design is. Due to its intimate process of making by hurdling over other phases like planning, sketching and so on, they are able to inject their imminent emotions and create sculptural into the pieces. Honesty, playfulness, humor and wit are some of the descriptive terms that unfold in these one of a kind pieces.
Image Courtesy of Godspeed
Image Courtesy of Godspeed
Image Courtesy of Godspeed
