The Future According to Karim Rashid
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 follow you throughout the house and privacy will be maintained by installing acoustical barriers.
Storage space is useless too, since in his disposable future the new will instantly replace the old. There will be no doorknobs or keys--”they are ridiculous”--but automated doors that respond to a fingerprint, a flick of the hand or brain waves. The house itself will be machine-made to be affordable for everyone and knocked down and recycled every 10 years.
If this future sounds a little, well, cold, consider all the stainless steel and marble in our houses of today.
Rashid prefers plastic laminate, squishy rubber and aerospace synthetics that don’t stain or lose their Kool-Aid colors.
He has a soft side, after all. The Cairo-born New York resident built an international reputation by designing tables, trash cans and perfume bottles that are curvy and cuddly.
He has sweet dreams too. Rashid’s bedroom of the future would be more like a cloud lofting over his cavernous domain. In this “complete sensorial experience,” he will “eat, sleep, watch, work, listen, read, sex, think, dream, philosophize, lament, converse, laugh and cry.”