Word: plasticizers
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...Jack Cole and Plastic...
Soon after Kasper Salto started his career as a furniture designer, he happened to be on the set of a photo shoot. Relaxing during a break, he picked up a light filter and began scrunching the plastic to make various shapes. Intrigued, Salto realized the filter could be curved in two directions at once. After three months experimentation with wood in a workshop, the plastic filter inspired the Runner chair, a wood and steel classic that is already a best seller...
...Salto, who has won five design awards for his chair, says his initial training as a cabinetmaker rather than a designer has a lot to do with the success of his projects. "It would be much easier in plastic, but plastic is not a typical Danish material," he says. "I have my roots in the Danish tradition of wooden furniture. It's a bigger challenge to me." So Salto made a prototype chair in the woodshop, then produced a design from which it could be manufactured...
...Another technological breakthrough occurred when Klint began playing around with wood lamination - a sandwich of thin pieces glued together - that the British had developed for airplanes in response to a lack of aluminum. The result is shapes that can be twisted and turned like plastic and yet remain sturdy. "Danish designers try to make their ideas suitable for industrial production,'' says Krogh. "It's something to do with our mentality that we don't like to do things that are very ornate." Krogh claims his own first: he used what is called precompressed wood, a process invented in Denmark...
...tradition, and this is the place to do it," he says. "I could go back and make gondolas in the U.S., but it's not as interesting." Besides, who in America knows a real gondola from a plywood imitation? "In Las Vegas you can see some very fancy plastic canoes with electric motors on them that pass for gondolas," he notes with disdain. The demand for gondolas is strong in the U.S. - they are a tourist draw in just about any city with a body of water - and he has sent two each to Austin, Boston and San Diego...