Dust Free Friends

Book excerpt: Dust Free Friends is a series of designs for small pieces of domestic furniture, designed by London-based 6a architects, that can be made very simply at home, in restricted spaces, with a small number of tools and without specialist skills. The lightness and simplicity of the pieces is derived from a combination of observation of the way simple plywood constructions on a construction site are adapted to become stools, tables, steps, and stairs, changing quickly and without fuss as workers need them. The designs also re-examine the long tradition of self-build that has shared the journey through modernism with industry and craft. In the early 1970s, Italian designer Enzo Mari (born 1932) published his seminal book of self-build furniture, Autoprogettazione ("Self-design," "Self-production," "Self-build" http: //www.corraini.com/en/catalogo/scheda_libro/62/Autoprogettazione), in direct competition with an expanding consumer market. Using rough sawn softwood, held together only by nails, the method matched the ad-hoc-ism and toolset of the time. Forty years later, affordable designer consumerism has more or less replaced old-fashioned messy DIY from our homes. Apple and Ikea have replaced amateurish tinkering with pleasure and promise sealed inside immaculate capsules. Today, the new lithium batteries at the heart of our wireless world have also revolutionized what we can do. With the cordless drill and self-tapping screw in one hand and the dust-free precision of the Festool saw in the other, the world of self-made furniture has re-opened with unprecedented speed and ease. With the Dust Free Friends series, Tom Emerson and Stephanie Macdonald invite the reader of this new book to make his or her own everyday furniture from dressed plywood. The rules the lay-out are easy to follow, end even more easy to change, to make best use of the sheet of plywood with the smallest number of cuts and least wastage. While almost every household has a cordless drill, rather fewer have a handheld electric saw. It is a useful addition but this can also be borrowed or rented--try your nearest designer, artist, or architect friend, there is bound to be one nearby. Precision and patience are more important than skill. Beautifully produced and illustrated with some 90 easy-to-understand diagrams and images, Dust Free Friends is a comprehensive, precise, and entertaining, manual to furnishing a comfortable place entirely by its users.