Nomadic urban lives
and temporary living
situations have given
rise to resourceful
shelf designs
that conformed to the shape of standard architraves and
mouldings. This meant anyone with access to a fab lab
and a hardware store could easily fabricate the unit.
You could write the history of shelving as a con-
stant balancing act between the functions of storage and
display. Solid-wood or glass-fronted antique cabinets are
characterized by their role, which was to protect few and
precious contents. In 1960 Dieter Rams’ 606 Universal
Shelving System revolutionized the idea by encouraging
us to span whole walls of our homes with open shelv-
ing. Similar designs encouraged a curatorial approach to
display but also assumed an affluent user with masses of
books, art and tasteful objects worthy of putting on show.
We see the results of that lineage today as the #shelfie –
an Instagram obsession for carefully arranging a shelf’s
contents to achieve an aesthetic effect.
If shelving in the modern era was about showing
off taste or enjoying the luxury of space that allowed for
huge spans of display, two of the 12 Shelves exhibits indi-
cate a departure from the typology. Bram Kerkhofs’ and
Sammi Cherryman’s compact freestanding cabinets are
both about obscuring their contents and granting the user
control over what is displayed. Kerkhofs’ enigmatic Coil
cabinet is shrouded in loops of thick elastic that the user
can part anywhere to retrieve what is within. Cherryman’s
Aerate bookcase is made of wood struts that give partial
visibility to the contents and lend access by means of a
subtle sliding door. These designs are about screening
and disguising, a possible reflection of a desire for greater
privacy in shared living spaces, or a sign of caution per-
taining to how much of ourselves we share offline and on.
It could be that in 2019, with consumerism on the decline,
we simply care less about what we have to show or how
we show it. Our relationship with what we own changes
continually, and the design of the shelf provides
a fascinating chronicle of our journey so far. ●
thearamgallery.organd resin for the design, Mass is decidedly more
sculptural than functional. With a ridiculous shape, it
almost serves as a cautionary tale for the more palatable
exhibits, while pointing out the short-lived utility of the
CD rack and suggesting that our technology-enabled
living habits could soon render the others useless, too.
Less cynical examples showed how the shelf
is capable of evolving to fit modern ways of living.
Increasingly nomadic urban lives and temporary living
situations have given rise to resourceful shelf designs
that ship flat and can be assembled without tools, screws
or glue. This was the thinking behind Butty, a freestand-
ing shelf from London-based studio Mentsen. Butty
features lightweight plywood shelves that can adjust to
any height thanks to a clamping device adapted from a
bike seat. Adam Blencowe and Thor ter Kulve’s Square
Peg System is an evolution of a previous project, Dado.
The latter design used side panels with CNC-cut holesThe sides of Bow, a wall-mounted shelf by
Katrin Greiling for Swedish Ninja, function
as bookends, framing the objects on display.FRAME LAB 155