Sometimes when doing major renovations, some people think that just throwing away furniture and other things are easier rather than thinking of ways that they can be saved or recycled. But as people have grown more conscious about how we consume and dispose of things, we’re seeing projects that are able to repurpose and upcycle various objects instead of just throwing them all into landfill or garbage disposal centers. Sometimes, the final product may actually look better than the original one where the materials came from.
Designer: Christoph Kurzmann
Oxford Brookes University was refurbishing and renovating around 250 student bedrooms in their dorms and had plans to just bring the furniture straight to the landfill. One of their furniture design students thought about using the raw material from the beds and drawers and incorporate them into new furniture designs. The Upscaling Upcycling project born and he wanted to use this as an example that designers can use materials from objects around them that can no longer be used.
What Kurzmann did was to disassemble the existing furniture and then use them to build new kinds of furniture that he designed. For the bedframes taken from the old dorms, he was able to turn them into stackable stools that have some overlapping lines and frames. He also used the bed slats to create stacking chairs, both with arms and without. He was able to turn the drawers into storage towers that act more like shelves.
The final furniture output are pretty well-designed and also very useful and practical. Good thing he was able to “save” these beds and drawers that would have otherwise just gone to waste or would have served as fire kindling. At least now, these pieces have also benefitted the school as they will be able to use it in various spaces.
