Can You Guess Which Roastable Vegetable Inspired This German-Designed Stool?
The rubber-encased oddity pictured below looks anything but organic — more like something straight out of Lady Gaga's prop arsenal — but its leg molds were actually cast from a familiar cruciferous vegetable: cauliflower.
Created by the Berlin-based Studio PASTERNAK, the stool, aka the "dematerialize project," is a study on "form, material and aesthetic perception," through the dissociation of familiar forms, according to founding designer Marcel Pasternak. In this case, the familiar form is your garden-variety cauliflower, rendered as bizarrely bulbous furniture legs. "We created a monster from cauliflower," he added.
To make the stool's cruciferous legs, Pasternak cast real cauliflowers in silicone before shaping them into elongated pieces. Negative forms of the legs were then created, which became the full molds to eventually be filled with a polyurethane resin material. As a contrast to the use of an organic source for the legs, Pasternak created the stool's seat from wood using a digitalized process and computer-controlled cutting machine.
It's been a big year for cauliflower, which has been getting all kinds of love on restaurant menus of late: we've seen it in steak form, puréed, roasted whole and flash-fried. Now you can sit on your produce and eat it too. But that said, the stools, which currently exist in a limited quantity of 20 art pieces, aren't likely to inspire a food-themed furniture series, Pasternak noted, with a wink: "Food should be eaten and not wasted on stupid stool ideas."
Up close, the familiar crags and divets of a cauliflower's head reveal themselves.[/caption]
With the exception of the brass detailing on each of the stool's feet, the entire object is covered in black silicone rubber.[/caption]
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