MLK
was developed to be a seat or side table. The light-weight stool can be easily moved around and used indoors as well as outdoors. It is a sculptural object that triggers ones curiousity and encourages you to look at it from different angles. Nevertheless it’s beauty comes from the simplicity of it’s construction, simular to the design of a milking-stool. It is also inspired by radical modernistic furniture between the 1920-1950s. In this manner the name “mlk” refers to the old rural tool as well as the abstract names given to furniture of that era.
The shape of the stool develops from an almost mathematic logic. Three legs are what is needed make any object stand up. Project these pointsup to a pleasant seating height and you
have this stoels basic form:
From the triangular seat three other triangular flaps fold down, touching the ground always below one corner of the horizontal surface. In order to give them their stability each of these flaps is folded back to the center again where they all meet. The stool can thus be made out of one sheet of material.
In the existing models the material is an aluminum-plastic-sandwich. It is a composite material of two aluminum sheets of 0.5 mm glued to a plastic core of 3 mm. The outline-shape is cut out and at every folding edge a V-shaped groove is milled away leaving only the outer aluminumsheet. In this way, the stool can be folded by hand. The three flaps connect in the middle with screws, but bolds or even gluing could also be
possible.
At the bottom the feet are chamfered. This way the stool is standing on the plastic core of the sheet rather than on the aluminum, to avoid scratching sensitive floors. As a product the stool could be delieverd in flat form ready to be folded by the customer.
The prototype has a boomeranglike angle cut into the triangular surfaces of the legs. This gives more clearance for your legs underneath the stool. A version with simple triangular sideflaps is also imaginable. Furthermore cushioning for the seat could be intigrated or offered as an additional comfort. *
summer 2006
