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Nakamichi T-100 Audio Analyzer

Joe Colombo, Total Furnishing Unit, (1971)

Colombo also began working in plastic with self-contained units that provided all the services of a room. He believed that “all the objects needed in a house should be integrated with the usable spaces; hence, they no longer ought to be called furnishings but ‘equipment.’” These “dynamic pieces of furniture” were useful because “habits change, the interior of rooms has to change with them.” One of the more interesting examples of this theory is the “Total Furnishing Unit” (1971), which breaks domestic living into a simple set of functions carried out within a modular Kitchen, Cupboard, Bed and Bathroom.

Colombo believed that the designer was the “creator of the environment of the future” and he was completely committed to building a new language of interior design by creating entire, seamless environments for living rather than individual pieces of furniture. His progressive work was driven by the desire to create an object that was “autonomous, independent of its architectural container, and that can be coordinated and programmed to adapt in any spatial situation, in the present or future.”