noam’s therapeutic rehabilitation for furniture, through design

this past spring, noam tabenkin graduated from the department of industrial design at the bezalel academy of arts & design, jerusalem*. in the spring of 2009, we had the good fortune of having noam as an exchange student for the id department at pratt. her studio choice was making meaning and she complimented our group well with her childern’s building toy project called, kish koosh:
lighting fires & making meaning’s mid-term critique . . .

noam recently sent us these images below of her final project at bezalel, which she described as beginning with our making meaning studio the year before, in new york, “once again, i thought of you and smiled. i think of your course as the starting point of my final project, although it has nothing to do with toys or children’s paintings. in your course i started exploring a visual language that deals with imperfections, and giving objects human-like gestures.” the anthropomorphic quality of noam’s furniture hospital project, is only one aspect of many that gives persona to her work. there are also correlation to be drawn to tejo remy’s work for droog as well as martino gamper’s experiments with building furniture from found objects &/or furniture fragments, for example, his 100 chairs in 100 days design project: martino gamper: 100 chairs in a 100 days

furniture hospital project:

the project deals with giving new life to damaged, out-of-use furniture. over the past year, I practiced furniture-healing through design. the cultural and personal history of each piece of damaged furniture served as a starting point for the treatment, which attempted to preserve each one of their stories. the intention was to explore with joy, the multiple personalities, and the defects that exist in old products, and to create a human and hybrid aesthetic language. i wanted to produce good furniture, both in terms of design and in terms of the functionality, furniture that is both desirable and durable. the project is a close up on my thoughts about a network of community workshops that will involved in the repair of furniture through design. It is an attempt create means of livelihood and education that perhaps will have an influence on our approach toward the use of objects and consumerism.

noam tabenkin 2010

*for more information about the bezalel academy of arts & design, jerusalem, please look at this link: http://www.bezalel.ac.il/en/