A chair made from plastic waste has become, thanks to the project by the Danish studio Lendager, the basic module for the creation of demountable exhibition pavilions

Imagine hundreds of chairs assembled to create the structure of a national pavilion at the Olympics. Once the games are over, the chairs can be dismantled and used again as chairs, and then, once again, transformed into another installation.

The project by Lendager Group is an endless journey, which began with the proposal for the Danish Pavilion at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and is still in circulation.

Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Milan Design Week 2021

The architecture studio Lendager Group has designed a chair in pure Danish style, but completely made with recycled materials from industrial and ocean waste.

The chair, thanks to a special attachment mechanism, then became the basic module for creating vertical structures, to be used on the wall as shelves or actual walls containing spaces and functions. The original idea was born for the Danish Pavilion at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics which was supposed to be a structure that was easy to dismantle and reuse.

The 2020 Olympics, as we know, were cancelled due to the pandemic and Lendager's circular idea had to wait.

It was in September 2021, on the occasion of the FuoriSalone in Milan, that Lendager's project materialized in the installation promoted by Denmark, in the cloisters of the Museum of Science and Technology in Milan, on the initiative of the Galleria Rossana Orlandi. The goal was achieved: the Danish exhibition left no waste behind and the brick-chairs returned to being simple chairs.

Paris 2024 Olympics

After the Tokyo proposal and the Milan Design Week, the chairs, in reality, did not just rest. Over a thousand chairs were donated to the Roskilde Festival, one of the most important European music festivals, and those disassembled from the pavilions, used for the Bornholm Folkemøde, the Climate Week in New York and an exhibition at the Design-Museum Danmark.

This year the project has once again found an institutional home, transforming itself into the Denmark Pavilion, on the Champs Élysées, on the occasion of the Paris 2024 Olympics.

The initiative, developed by the Danish Ministry of Industry, Trade and Financial Affairs and Visit Denmark, in collaboration with the philanthropic association Realdania, has once again demonstrated the versatility of design which - as Niklas Nolsøe of Lendager Architects said - has rewritten the dogma according to which form must follow function: form, in this case, instead follows the availability of materials.

The interiors of the Denmark Pavilion, conceived by the Copenhagen-based architecture studio Briq, for the period of the Olympics played the role of cultural center and meeting place and were also used to narrate the story of this constantly evolving circular pavilion.

The chairs at the Fondation Danoise

The final stop for the chairs, once dismantled from the pavilion for the Paris Olympics, was to return to their original function at the Fondation Danoise: the home for Danish students and researchers in Paris, active since 1932.

But how did Lendager's chair come about? The studio, known for its resource-friendly design focus, had collaborated with brewers to produce plastic beer kegs, a solution that allowed beer to stay fresh for 30 days, compared to 7 for a traditional aluminum keg, and that allowed the creation of kegs that could be compressed after use, making them more effective for waste collection and transportation.

The next step was to ask ourselves whether it was possible to find a way to reuse the kegs once they were no longer used?

The studio has thus designed a chair with a load-bearing frame in recycled wood and a plastic seat, obtained partly from recycled beer kegs and partly from fishing nets.

#Features #Latest 2024
fb messenger tel

See
also

Fermentation: a journey between taste and ecosystem symbiosis
#FEATURES

Fermentation: a journey between taste and ecosystem symbiosis

Bringing complex conversations to the table: Fritto Misto's research
#FEATURES

Bringing complex conversations to the table: Fritto Misto's research

Coffee and Design: The Evolution of an Increasingly Intimate Understanding
#FEATURES

Coffee and Design: The Evolution of an Increasingly Intimate Understanding

In defense of defects
#FEATURES

In defense of defects