The Creators – Étagère Terrarium – France
Waste is a resource that is too little used and unknown to the general public. Nowadays, only some seasoned craftsmen can handle them. They are the materials of tomorrow.
Waste is any residue of a process of production, transformation or use, any substance, material, product (etc.) that its holder intends to abandon. Nowadays in our society, we produce a lot of waste and very little is reused in a creative way. In this project, we strive to recover poorly recycled materials. Also, another question arose, very few people have access to green spaces or do not have time to go for a walk. We built our project bearing these two problems in mind.
After hours of research, we came up with the idea of bringing “nature” to the apartments. We thought the terrarium to be the most aesthetic method, however it takes up space. It had to be successfully integrated into an object or piece of furniture to reduce the impact in space.
At first, we thought to insert it in a table. But the material was not adapted to our expectations and we had to change our mind. The idea of several superimposed ecosystems pleased us. Like the shape of the “localriver” of Matthieu Lehanneur, but we decided to apply it vertically, so we opted for Scandinavian style shelving. We realized that the project was perhaps too heavy and imposing. We therefore sought to preserve the aesthetics but in a more compact and feasible form. We made a shelf with 4 floors or between each plank come 3 staggered terrariums.
The furniture will be dressed with beneficial health plants. The idea is to set up 2 terrariums of aromatic plants and only one to clean the air of the room. We selected the following species: Basil, Chives, Mint, Melisse Officinale, Croton and Chlorophistium. They will be planted in a substrate. The desire to clean up the air makes the furniture a productive type within the furniture environment. Our interiors are more and more polluted by different solvents present in the cleaning products for instance. The special interest of this project and to design a cradle for life consisting of materials intended to be destroyed. This symbolic virtuous circle has really brought us into the choice of materials and plants. The virtuous circle will valorize wastes destined to be destroyed in an aesthetic structure with a cleaning aspect. The plants will allow a more relaxed atmosphere. They are more and more used in enclosed spaces to create a sort of escape into a beautiful and natural world.
For the materials used, we wanted to choose fairly common waste. For this purpose, all the objects used are waste recovered within the ATELIER D’éco SOLIDAIRE.
We also examined the fact that these wastes are recurrent in everyday life. For our structure, we chose Oriented Strand Board (OSB) boards that are very commonly used in all types of construction sites around the world. These OSB planks are urban materials, very accessible to all, its raw appearance attracts more and more designers. Its properties are also interesting: it is solid, durable, of a very good quality and favors the wood from thinning (trees cut down in order to favor the development of the better trees). Then we decided to transform the plastic beer barrels to create our terrariums. These barrels are very practical to work and give a very good result. We used them because this waste will take more and more scale with its more accessible features than stainless steel drums. All the parts of this waste will be transformed, we used the bases of the barrels to turn them into the feet of our project, ” nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything changes” says Antoine Lavoisier.
