Tag: Bends

Slinky Chairs: Accordion-Style Transforming Furniture Stretches & Bends

[ By SA Rogers in Design & Furniture & Decor. ]

What starts as a flat, stackable, highly portable package expands more than ten times its original size when you pull on either end, bending and curling to become a sofa for a group. The Flexible Love Sofa and Chair are made from 100% recycled paper, yet they’re surprisingly strong, with the longer sofa holding up to 4,232 pounds at once when fully expanded. Designed in Taiwan, the series is available in ‘marble’ white, ‘lava’ black and ‘earth’ brown, and measures just over 5 inches across when collapsed.

The Flexible Love company shows off what the seats can do in a series of videos, so you can see it in action. It looks remarkably easy to manipulate, and somehow stays in place when you curl it into an S-shape or bend one end to the ground. If you’re skeptical that it can really hold as much weight as the company claims when expanded to its full 30-foot width, they’ve provided several images in which a group of people all stand on the seat at once.

With furniture like this, you’d never need to worry about accommodating extra guests again. It’s fun to see the different ways in which it can be arranged around tables. Each piece is hand-crafted of FSC-certified materials, assembly-free, recyclable and made with non-toxic finishing. Though the Flexible Love website is currently down for maintenance, you can purchase both the sofa and chair model at Expand Furniture in the meantime, with prices starting at $ 380.

10 Transformable, Convertible & Collapsible Urban Furnitures

(Check out our complete collection of Unusual, Creative and Transforming Furniture.)
Cramped? As cities become denser, we all find ourselves wishing we had more space at times, or wanting to make …

Prototype to Reality: Super Space-Saving Bedroom Set

Starting as a compact rectangle measuring just 13 square feet, the Matroshka all-in-one furniture set just continues to unfold, slide out and transform again and again until you think there can’t …

Fold-Out Life: 13 Space-Saving & Expanding Room Elements

Murphy beds and small table surfaces aren’t the only interior elements that can pop out of walls or freestanding cabinets to offer extra function when it’s needed. Entire kitchens, living rooms, …

[ By SA Rogers in Design & Furniture & Decor. ]

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WebUrbanist

October 6, 2017
Spatial Bodies: Warped Architecture Bends & Twists Osaka Skyline

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Photography & Video. ]

Imagine a world in which an abandoned city goes to seed, but rather than plants reclaiming buildings, the buildings grow and morph like unkempt weeds, twisting the skyline into impossible new patterns.

In their project Spatial Bodies, AUJIK envisions architecture as something organic, skyscrapers like trees and vines that curve, wrap and interlock to create fresh and unpredictable formations.

The team compiled aerial drone footage, manipulating it in Autodesk 3D studio and combining it with Google Maps images. The resulting urban landscapes are both real and surreal, vaguely recognizable and semi-coherent but contorted and distorted. Buildings grow from familiar foundations, but wiggle and wind in unnatural and unexpected ways.

From the artists: “Spatial Bodies depicts the urban landscape and architectural bodies as an autonomous living and self replicating organism. Domesticated and cultivated only by its own nature. A vast concrete vegetation, oscillating between order and chaos.”

Many of the shots in the film are largely static, but in a way that helps make them comprehensible to viewers: it is almost impossible to take in the scenes as they pass by even in still format. Limiting the realtime motion of structures in the video also reflects their plant-like nature, implying that these transformations will take time, just like growing organic material in the wild.

World-Warping Photography Bends, Twists & Tears Reality

Life feels rather rigid and unyielding sometimes, which is why it’s nice to have art like Jan Kriwol’s into which we can escape momentarily. Kriwol’s series “Paper Realities” only consists of …

Crazy Contortionist Street Art: Bodies in Urban Spaces

How would you react if you were walking down a crowded city street and 20 people suddenly ran past you and crammed their bodies into the tiny space between two buildings? What if you happened to …

Living Street Art: Contorted Human Bodies in Urban Spaces

If you were to pass a bunch of colorfully-dressed human figures crammed into a crawlspace beneath a public staircase, you might think they’re mannequins at first, with their splayed limbs and …

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Photography & Video. ]

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WebUrbanist

August 27, 2016
Mirage Muralist: Street Artist Bends Surfaces Using Illusion

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

With works often requiring second looks or sanity checks, artist Pejac bends reality in his use of paint and other materials to create sublime art from walls, streets, sidewalks and gutters.

His newest works in Paris, shown above and below, play with our sense of surface and depth, revealing a hidden world beyond the wall in each case. If the close-up scene looks familiar, you may recognize it as The Luncheon on the Grass by Manet.

Likewise implying something secret is this silhouette of a door – at a glance, it is hard to tell what part is a real crack in the concrete and which pieces are simply painted on top.

In previous projects, he has also played with the arts of subtraction and illusion in other clever ways – letting the world, for instance, slowly melt, drip and trickle toward the drain.

Some of these works are quite time-intensive and incredibly detail-sensitive, like this final piece in which the artist carefully chipped away at the white paint on a brick wall to selectively reveal the red surface below it.

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Sideways Street Art: Muralist Makes Figures Walk on Walls

These layered creations are surprisingly realistic, even in black and white, thanks in part to their scale and reinforced by their shadows and context.
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2D or Not 2D? Body Paint Illusion Makes Faces Look Flat

Three-dimensional human bodies are transformed to look like paintings on a flat surface in this curious collaboration between a makeup artist, a photographer …
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Who is He? About Banksy: Famously Anonymous Street Artist

Who is Banksy? No one knows for sure but many have speculated about the identity of this mysterious urban street artist – learn more about him here.
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[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

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WebUrbanist

September 12, 2014
World-Warping Photography Bends, Twists & Tears Reality

[ By Delana in Art & Photography & Video. ]

Life feels rather rigid and unyielding sometimes, which is why it’s nice to have art like Jan Kriwol‘s into which we can escape momentarily. Kriwol’s series “Paper Realities” only consists of three photographs, but they are remarkable for their realism and their fun treatment of fantasy.

In all three of the photos, the photographer has made the world appear as no more substantial than a piece of paper. A young man casually breaks through a split in the very fabric of space/time in one picture. In another, a man’s powerful jump has caused wrinkles to appear in the paper world. And in the third, a disgruntled figure pulls angrily at a locked storefront, causing sharp wrinkles to appear all around.

The photographs are simple enough, but they reflect a desire that nearly all of us have had at one time or another: to reach out and change reality. Kriwol’s characters do just that by interacting with their surroundings as if they were no more substantial than a parking ticket.

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Interpreting the City: Creative Urban Photography at Three Different Scales

Creative urban photographers have a way of representing cities in new and different lights.
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Portrait Photography: 12 Creative Portraiture Photographers

Ephemeral, always changing, portraits are about capturing a person in a precise moment of time. Here are 13 creative portraits and 12 portraiture photographers.
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[ By Delana in Art & Photography & Video. ]

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WebUrbanist

October 21, 2012