Art & Exhibitions
Sebastian Errazuriz Explodes Design
THE DAILY PIC: The Spanish designer's traditional jointing expands the sideboard.
Blake Gopnik
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Click on my image to see the Daily Pic’s first GIF, in honor of a most animated piece of design. The object is titled Explosion, and I recently caught sight of it in Pittsburgh at the Carnegie Museum of Art’s survey of the Chilean designer Sebastian Errazuriz. This sideboard is made of maple, and it’s built using traditional dovetail jointing, yet it has an utterly untraditional feel. For one thing, it doesn’t have the single, signature “look” of most high-end pieces of furniture: Its tame, closed state, as a plain rectangular solid, is its least typical aspect, while no single state of openness can represent it.
If you define a sideboard as a box that opens to allow it to house things, then this, for all its strangeness, is the Platonic sideboard. All it does is open and house–and show off the kind of fine jointing that furniture has long been about.
I’m particularly keen on the fact that this avant-garde object can actually be used as a fully functional cupboard. I’ve always felt that an entirely non-functional work of design is precisely as flawed as one that is all-function and nothing else. Explosion represents a perfect middle ground of excellence.
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