Look around your kitchen, and what do you see? Rectangles everywhere. Your refrigerator is a rectangle, your shelves are rectangles, your breadbox is a rectangle, and chances are, if you walk through the other rooms in your house, that will be true of pretty much every other object too.
South Korean designer Dahm Lee wanted to challenge the totalitarianism of the rectangle in interior design, so she made the Quadrat, a multi-purpose object in a very non-standard shape and configuration.
In looks, the Quadrat is an oddity. With its steel bars wrapped in yellow rubber straps, it appears as though the object is trying to hold several different perspectives at once. According to Lee, the shape itself was inspired by a desire to usurp the "routine standardizations" of the regular shapes that make up most of the objects in our lives.
"Before the Quadrat, I was working on a project called Dami and Daki where the stool I was making was essentially square," Lee tells Co.Design. "I then looked around my room, and noticed that I was literally surrounded by them."
Lee decided that maybe it wasn't hip to be square. Since Lee specializes in designing multifunctional objects with many different purpose--one of her previous projects is a table that can be hung on the wall as a picture--she decided that the Quadrat should be a device that was not only amorphous in shape, but function.
"With the Quadrat, I set out to design something with only form in mind," says Lee. "Something graphical and aesthetic, without worrying about its function. It was only when I was satisfied with the form and color of the Quadrat that I started to think of its function."
For the shape, Lee twisted together something between a pentagon, hexagon, and tetragon. Each Quadrat she sells is unique, so the shapes differs. Likewise, so do the uses to which the object can be put. You might hang wine glasses with the Quadrat, use it as a towel rack, turn it into a bookshelf, or put it to use as a lampshade.
You can buy one for about $200.