︎︎︎ Stack Ring

Replica of the Wood Ring bench for Beijing Design Week 2013 created in cooperation with a small local plastic injection-moulding factory called Beijing Green Leave and New Land Plastic Company.

Wood is a scarce material in China, especially in large lengths necessary to build the Wood Ring. So instead of wood I used a material that China has in abundance; products, more specifically stackable products like stools. I'm interested in how an abundance of products can be treated as a new kind of raw material and how to find ways to manipulate that into new objects.

I used one of the injection moulding machines in the factory to produce 250 stools. Starting with a white stool, I kept adding more red pellets to the mix so that every time a stool popped out it was slightly more red. I stacked the stools and pushed them in the shape of a circle, like a snake that eats its tail, to create a circular bench with a diameter of 3.5 meter.

Custom colored polypropylene stools
Ø 350 / height 34 cm

Organized by SALON/ BJ and supported by the City of Amsterdam,
Creative Industries Fund NL, BJDW and SALON/ Foundation

Drawing © Jan Rothuizen 2013
Photography © Studio Chris Kabel 2013, © Jan Willem Kaldenbach 2013