3 empty water bottles patiently stood next by my desk awaiting their fate. My office building does not recycle plastic. As I toyed with disposal possibilities that created mounting alarm in my business partner, I took a closer look. The shape of a Smart water bottle is very elegant, and the side with the semi transparent caps has an especially strong aesthetic quality. Recycling a potential contributor to a land-fill as inexpensive furniture seemed an obvious, if not original idea! Our office waiting area lacked a coffee table - and this seemed a natural fit. The objective for this project was to create a table out of reused and reclaimed materials
The base of the table consists of Smart water bottles melted together with a Weld-On plastic adhesive. The table top is a slab of Varia Ecoresin which is in turn made of 40% pre- consumer recycled content from the 3-Form reclaim program. The reclaim program reuses and recycles materials removed from installations or panels damaged in production. It prevents panels from entering the landfill and extends their useful life. By filling the bottles with colored beads (recycled), crumpled fabric or light powder, the tables can be uniquely customized to an individual's taste - and yes, if they are willing, to their mood!
The table top slab stays in place with its own 25 lb weight. It's semi-transparency matches that of the bottle caps. The basic element of the base is a frustum of nine bottles each - three frusta are used. Depth and sculpture are introduced by offsetting selected bottles and flipping their direction. The pattern created in this manner appears as two triangles and a seemingly suspended truncated triangle in the middle. The outer two triangles book-end a flattened U that supports the middle triangle. The spaces between the supports is used to store newspapers, magazine and books.
Another option as a table top is plywood painted with chalk paint. It adds color and can be drawn on.
Similar to Duchamp's Readymades, this design moves the water bottles from garbage to a functional piece of design in a new context. While not tailored for mass production, it uses leftovers from mass production as its components and provides a high level of contextual customization.