Avenue Design Competition: The Recip

While working on their masters degrees in architecture at the University of Calgary, Bryan Gartner and his two pals, Richard Cotter and Alison MacLachlan, came to a stark realization: the constant packing and unpacking that student life demands really sucks. “You’re always packing things around, going to summer jobs and starting school again, so you begin to look for multiple uses for things,” says Gartner. “We began to wonder, instead of having all these pieces of furniture, why couldn’t you have only one?”

With this idea in mind, the three design pals decided to build the Recip, a multifunctional piece of furniture that can be reconfigured into a chair, a table, a bookcase, a spatial divider and any number of other applications.

“The idea started off with the chair being like dice, in that you could just roll it over and it would become different things,” says Gartner.
The design trio started playing around with Coroplast, cutting the plastic, cardboard-like material into rectangles and taping it together. They then put T-grooves along the bottom of the Coroplast pieces to see if they could create a malleable structure that locked into itself to form something sturdy enough to hold the weight of a person. Eventually, when they found a configuration that could work, they moved on to creating a rubber prototype covered in a thick layer of felt for comfort.

“It’s incredibly challenging to get a material that is bendable, but can still actually support a human being,” says Gartner. “The last thing you want is to get someone to sit on it and have it flatten out on the ground.”

With this project complete, Gartner and his design partners are now looking forward to building other innovative pieces. “This is only the first of several projects to come,” he says.

Click here to view the rest of the Avenue design competition winners.