Chinatown Library Furniture

Boston, USA

Furniture / Product

Architects: iVY Design Associates

Location: Boston, USA
Year: 2012

The project was to design and fabricate 30 pieces of furniture for the Chinatown Lantern Reading Room in Boston. This little library was a two-year pilot program designed to test the idea of building a permanent cultural and educational center that would house a public library in Boston’s Chinatown. To accommodate the changing needs of the library in the future, the furniture was designed to be movable, rearrangeable, reconfigurable and readily mass-producible. Depending on the arrangement, the furniture can be used as chairs, tables, desks and/or bookcases. One set of furniture comprises 15 pieces in five different shapes, all cut out of one standard-size 4’ x 8’ plywood sheet. Each shape comes in three sizes so that they can nest inside of each other. This single cut-pattern template allows for easy reproduction when the library expands in the future. One piece of furniture is made of 15 layers of plywood; therefore, 15 sheets of plywood will produce a total of 15 pieces of furniture.

More about project: https://www.ivydesign.associates/#/furn-chinatown-library-furniture/