Brooklyn furniture brand UM Project created the “Otherworldly” storage cabinets, and they used plastic tube armor, knitted fabrics and cast concrete to make this fantastic collection.
The Ultraframe collection includes six storage cabinets of different shapes and sizes. Some have obvious uses – an armoire, a chest of drawers, a console – but the functions of others are open to interpretation.
Piece B in the Ultraframe collection features a cast concrete shell set inside an MDF frameUM Project, which stands for User & Maker, took cues from architecture and transport design to develop the unusual structures. The studio, founded by Francois Chambard, then named the pieces alphabetically.
For the structure of Piece E, the studio intersected layers of aluminum
“The design and fabrication process borrows from traditional furniture making and also to architecture or transportation design like aerospace, automotive, shipbuilding by applying flexible skins or hard shells to variously engineered substructures,” Chambard told Dezeen.
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“Rigorous and geometric frames are completed by soft or rounded covers, shells or inserts,” he continued. “The result is both familiar and otherworldly, yielding a family of pieces that are part furniture, part vessel.”
Piece A is a chest wrapped in a layer of blue fabric but also features a motorized head
Many of the pieces pair industrial materials with knitted textiles by Dutch brand Febrik, which also presented in the exhibition.
For instance, the maple body of Piece A, a chest, is wrapped with folded and layered tubes of blue fabric. It is topped with a motorized head that lifts up, which is made of lacquered aluminum to match a lacquered MDF door.
Piece C features an aluminum frame covered in plastic tubes
Similarly, the aluminum frame of bookshelf Piece C is covered in phenolic tubes – a type of laminated plastic.
“We looked at different skins including hinged flat panels, knitted materials, and thick fabrics,” said Chambard. “After some experimentation and prototyping, we settled on a chainmail using phenolic tubing, one of our favorite materials.”
Piece D is a chest of drawers made from black cork, while Piece E is made up of intersected layers of aluminum that can be covered in a fabric fitted slipcover.
There is also a horizontal unit, Piece F, which is fronted with slats of Corian
Lastly, Piece F is fronted by fins of Corian. Unlike the others, it has a horizontal shape with a black aluminum and wood drawer.
Source: Dezeen
