If you ever wanted to own a cabinet that channels the cover art of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, here's your chance: the Wave Cabinet, a sideboard created by New York artist and designer Sebastian Errazuriz, is a piece that collapses and expands like a waveform made out of wood.
Made out of baltic birch in both white lacquered and unlacquered finishes, the Wave Cabinet consists of roughly a hundred movable slats. Each slat is joined to the ones surrounding it in such a way that it allows the Wave Cabinet to open and close almost like the rolling ripples of a paper fan.
According to the designer, the Wave Cabinet is designed to make people curious enough to play with it.
"I am inviting people to look at one of the simplest forms of furniture design and to forget that we're talking about furniture, instead to see it as a way of breaking a box," Errazuriz explains about the Wave Cabinet as part of his artist's statement."I love the idea of creating beautiful furniture; nevertheless I am much more interested in using the medium as an excuse to trigger people's curiosity and create a connection with them."
And the wavelike motion has a pretty hypnotic effect. In a video demonstrating the cabinet, Errazuriz manipulates the piece with fluid motions, almost like he is dipping his hands into a wave pool. And the design has some practical aspects too. For example, the Wave Cabinet can be opened from almost any direction. This allows you to do things like keep objects on the the top of the cabinet, even as you open it from the front.
If Errazuriz's name sounds familiar, it's because he's the same guy who created a cabinet that was like an iron maiden of bamboo skewers, a dozen pairs of 3-D printed shoes designed to look misogynist, and even a crazy sandcastle that looks just like an aircraft passing overhead.
When it comes to a priori art, though, the past project Errazuriz's Wave Cabinet most resembles is this one: the Explosion Cabinet, a sideboard made of interlocking slabs of maple that does what it says on the tin. The Wave Cabinet, though, might be our favorite design of his so far.
[via Prosthetic Knowledge]