The Future According to Karim Rashid
January 23, 2005 | Levent OZLER
Perhaps because he broke his toe on one, Karim Rashid derides coffee tables as useless chunks of history. The radical industrial designer, who has developed a few thousand products for Toyota, Target and other corporate giants, says we need to toss them out, along with old-fashioned notions that our lives are better with such things as traditional walls and storage space.
"Comfort is not a style but a performance issue," he says. "Our domestic environment should be as smart, seductive and engaging as a laptop and other technology."
In his stripped-down "technorganic" house of the future, architecture, furniture and technology will be of a piece. The floor will rise up in spots to form a chaise longue that contours to the body. Then, with a voice command, the chaise will flatten to become a bed. The bathroom will be seamless too, a watertight rubber module that cleans itself with sprays of detergent and water.
In Rashid's world, there will be no windows, entertainment centers or heating/cooling units. Structural liquid-crystal walls will generate the climate, polarize to block or let in light, and act as wallpaper or a TV screen. "You can come home one day to fluorescent pink walls, and then to a wall of CNN," he says. "This is why I want to live in the future."
In his mostly open interiors, light and music will foll
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