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@the-vulcan
I'd rather not interact with religious blogs 🐁 please just block me and move on.
TO DO LIST:
Imp Questchain 051 (0/2), 053 (1/3)
Aftermath of a revelation (11/16)
Two Prophecies AU 'reaserch' update + one design
MASTERLIST
(Basically all projects I remembered to link)
GAME!
∑ Solarpunk A small solo or co-op ttrpg for a brighter future. City builder sand box very simple game.
penis magician voice is this your penis
Plastic Chair in Wood by Maarten Baas (2008)
I'm obsessed with this chair. The artist takes a flimsy hunk of injection-molded plastic that's been cost-cut to hell and back, and insists that we look at it with fresh eyes and understand its beauty. And they went about it in the most labor-intensive way I can think of.
Absolutely nothing about this design is convenient to execute in wood. Every piece is curved, most have compound curves. This is artisan craftsmanship: it's inherently slow, manual, and skilled. Notice, also, that most features of this chair must be thicker and heavier than on the plastic chairs being imitated. Injection-molded chairs can be produced in this shape in a matter of minutes with far less material at very low cost.
If these flowing, organic curves are so beautiful in polished wood, perhaps they are also beautiful in the mass-produced chairs that are far more accessible. Perhaps we should remember to admire designs that succeed enough to become ubiquitous. I don't know about you, but I'll never see injection-molded chairs the same way again.
@puppygirllaika
I agree with all of this, but YOU HAVE HIT UPON A FORGOTTEN TRUTH OF PLASTIC CHAIRS!!!!!
The standard one-piece injection molded plastic chair is referred to as a "Monobloc", literally just describing it as a single piece. The history of this chair is fascinating, and it all starts back in 1946, with the D.C. Simpson Monobloc.
Douglas Colborne Simpson was an architect mostly active in the 40's and 50's, designing a lot of classic mid-century style buildings in Vancouver, Canada(1). In 1946, as part of a government project to find new uses for materials developed for WWII, he and engineer James Donahue developed the design you see above, simply called the Monobloc(2). Unfortunately, we don't know a lot about this chair as it was only ever a prototype, and no modern examples have survived, nor have most of the records surrounding it(3). To my knowledge, we don't actually know if this was technically injection molded, or crafted some other way. We can't even be sure if it was technically the inspiration for the designs that followed, but no matter the case it has lent its name to the entire genre.
Plastics technology was simply not what it is today back in the 1940's. Most people would have had very little plastic in their homes, most likely just a few pieces of Bakelite (the first commercially viable plastic, made from a formaldehyde based resin in a Bakelizer, the best name for any industrial manufacturing equipment ever). Over the following few decades, however, as a wider variety of plastics were both developed and came down in price to the point of commercial viability, the concept of the plastic chair was revisited, and the first folks to revisit it were Helmut Batzner, in 1964, and Joe Colombo, in 1965.
This, is the Bofinger chair, Batzner's design:
The elements of D.C.Simpson's Monobloc were pretty alien compared to todays mass-manufactured plastic chairs, but here we start to see some more modern elements come into play. The first thing you probably notice is the front legs, which have that characteristic visible 90 degree bend in them for added rigidity, plus a much more comfortably leaned back and slightly scoop-shaped seat. We also see much more support in the back rest, with broad triangles allowing for a more efficient use of materials without losing back support.
Similar to Simpson, Batzner was not an industrial designer, but an architect, and this chair had a very specific purpose. Batzner and his team designed it as part of a project to build a new theater in Karlsruhe, Germany, which required a large amount of additional seating which could be easily packed away into storage or distributed around the theaters rooms by the staff (4). As such, it was designed to be both lightweight and stackable, so several of them could be moved by one person, and they could be stored compactly. This piece of furniture was a huge hit a the theater, and was so popular that 120,000 units would ultimately be manufactured and sold around the world, with each one taking just 5 minutes to produce (4).
Around the same time, Joe Colombo enters the scene with this:
Colombo was an artist in several mediums who, after taking over his families appliance company in the 50's, made the shift towards architecture and interior design, and started designing a wide array of trend-setting furniture(5). The chair shown above is known as the Universale (sometimes referred to as the Chair Universal 4867), designed in 1965. This chair differs pretty greatly from the ones that came after it, it many ways it represents a different path that could have been taken, but it's also very widely referenced as an inspiration for what is broadly considered the origin of the white plastic chair the world over.
Enter: the Fauteuil 300
This is, arguably, the first iteration of the white plastic chair we all know today. Designed by Henry Massonnet in 1972, the Fauteuil 300 and it's imitators are, collectively, the single most widely used piece of furniture in the entire world(6). Before that, however, it was something else entirely: works of art.
What might be hard to recognize in hindsight is that all of these chairs described so far were not everyday objects. They were on the forefront of modern design, they made use of brand new materials and manufacturing processes, and at the time they were each made, they were slick, stylish, and fairly expensive. Despite the speed at which they could be manufactured, these innovative, high-end chairs rose sharply in cost up through the early 1980's due to the sheer demand for them. They weren't cheap spare seating you stuck in the garage, they were placed at dining tables and on fine patios, and they were a wildly popular talking point. That's not to say their expense justified their artistic value, but rather that their expense and popularity was a product of their status as highly contemporary and boundary-pushing designs.
With the price of plastics declining after the 70's, the increasing accessibility of injection molding to manufacturers, and the widespread popularity of these designs, copycats proliferated rapidly, and eventually drove the price down. This era, in the 80's and 90's, is when these chairs became cheap an ubiquitous, and where they became manufactured the world over.
And here is where we reach this piece, "Plastic chair in wood", by Maarten Baas, and a piece of the history I've left out so far. The Monobloc was designed to be made out of wood. Like the the other chairs designed by Joe Colombo, like the chairs that predated the Simpson, the Monobloc was designed with the intention of using laminated plywood, but as the artists and designers behind them began to experiment with new materials they fell in love with the idea of making them from plastic, and so they did. They redesigned and redesigned until they made something that would be impossible to make in wood at a price most people could afford, but which could be made from plastic in mere minutes. The organic curves and thin profiles would take so much time, so much waste material, so much skill and effort to create if made of wood that they could never be furniture, they could only be art. Baas' chair is a perfect, beautiful reflection of that.
That, in brief, is the history of the design of the white plastic Monobloc chair, but it's not all there is to know. In fact, it's kind of just the start. I've linked my sources below, but I would strongly recommend checking out the German documentary Monobloc, by Hauke Wendler. It goes over the history, but it's far more interested with what the Monobloc means, and what it's place is in our world today. The impact it's made, the better and the worse, and what it says about us. It's fascinating, and well worth your time.
sources below.
Always fun to learn about a tumblr friends surprise special interest
We all hear about the hatemail and PVP, but this site is also unmatched for activating a trap card.
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Daily painting 141/365
Thanks for the ride! That was fun!!🌳🐅
monster moodboards: Vampire
a vampire is a being from folklore that subsists by feeding on the life essence (generally in the form of blood) of the living
for the good of all mankind
Detente for the Ravenous by @monsterfactoryfanfic
One of the best things a game can do, in my opinion, is give you specificity of setting and then tell you "these are your toys, do with them what you will". Aaron sets you up for success early in DftR with this note that not only might your setting look different than the one he wrote, but it SHOULD look different.
No sense being precious about the game's setting when you play. It's there to inspire and make your own! You're not going to be audited by the game designer or some nebulous council of lorekeepers.
Anybody knows what that first font is in the header?
is it really possible for a girl to eat a burger....
ourger -> 🍔
String identified: t a a g t at a g…. ag at t a t cg c t' t a cct t a t c tat at a g t c t t t at a at a ct t atg cat t a g -> 🍔
Closest match: Anthopleura xanthogrammica genome assembly, chromosome: 4 Common name: Giant Green Sea Anemone
(image source)
Putting together large scale events when you have half a year for it:
Now imagine you have 2 months....
Their name is French Fry
(AKA was inspired by all the goofy Eridians I'm seeing so here's my contribution.)
Ryland Grace Erid apology tour (Huh forgave him instantly. he still hasn't recovered tho). Also please don't mind me I posted it at 4 am at first
Based on this specific comment:
Pentose is a huge softie though it takes them a while to get used to new people.
Speaks an eridian language similar to Rocky's from a neighbouring country (think like czech and slovak). In the human range of hearing it sounds like a guitar.
Comissions status: open.
Got a Star Trek and an Eridian oc on board as well as a pony, two cats and four humanoids. (And there will be moreeee.)
https://artfight.net/~Lemuryjka
Movie marathon realizations
Since Vulcan and Erid are a part of the same 3 sun system why not combine two worlds into one?
Finally my Star Trek ocs are getting a plot hear ye, hear ye!
A crew of vulcan hybrids that mostly did trade negotiations is thrown back into their home quadrant after a simple conference turns into an intergalactic slap in the face to all Federation officers. All this just to rediscover the early history of the UFP (especially the role Project Hail Mary played in the delayed acceptance of humans).
Aroace ryland grace my beloved
