Page Turner - Collapsibles

The Age

Wednesday July 5, 2006

MIRANDA TAY

BOOK REVIEW: Collapsibles, A Design Album of Space-Saving Objects, By Per Mollerup, Published by Thames & Hudson, hardcover, RRP $39.95

FROM its opening statement - "Man, himself a collapsible being, physically and psychologically, needs and wants collapsible tools" - through to a later caption describing Jan Dranger's a.i.r series of inflatable furniture for the design house - "IKEA don't usually waste printer's ink on telling customers who designs their furniture but now and again some information escapes" - this gem of a book is a fount of irresistible observations.

Author Per Mollerup, director of an award-winning Scandinavian design firm specialising in corporate identity and environmental signage, has gathered more than 500 objects into a source-book of space-savers. The only criterion is that it has to be a true collapsible, with an impractical shape and size, and the space it occupies must be redistributed in one way or another, again and again.

This can be achieved in a number of ways; folding, compressing, inflating and creasing being some of them. Above all, it must be a measure of convenience. Thus the book itself, and this newspaper, is a collapsible; a paper cup designed to be used only once is not. There are quasi collapsibles: height-adjustable chairs do not save space. And there are the ones that give infinite pleasure: DuPont nylons expand by several hundred per cent "while improving drastically in appearance". A section is devoted to furniture and its mobile functionality. The book's brevity is the very soul of wit, designed to be read over and over again.