very cool
Raugh Furniture Prototype #1
In 1998 Andrea Zittel moved back to her home state of California, leaving behind her home and finely honed showroom testing grounds in NY, which she called “The A-Z.” For the previous eight years she had been working to create a complete world that incorporated all of the elements of day to day living from the clothing that she wore to the food that she ate.
Everything seemed to dovetail together perfectly into a seamless system – one which was neat, compact and complete.
But the transition to California led to many challenges. Life became bigger, messier and a lot more difficult to streamline. In short, it became impossible to “A-Z” her new life – so she did what she has always done in situations like this and assessed the new circumstances and created an ideology (and corresponding design) to embrace them.
Raugh is the term that describes this new lifestyle. Although it is pronounced “raw”, it doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing. While “Raw” suggests a more natural or original state, “Raugh” on the other hand actually means the way that something becomes naturally “undone” over time and as the result of repeated lived experience. Our house is really “Raugh” these days, and it feels great. Raugh plays with the idea of “natural order” and the way that the most progressive designs start out by looking backwards towards a more original or pure state of being.
There are many “Rules of Raugh”, some of which include:
• Raugh is absolutely comfortable
• Instead of being easy to clean, a Raugh surface absorbs or camouflages dirt rather than reveals it
• Since everything will ultimately break down or wear out, a Raugh design must deteriorate beautifully
• Something Raugh doesn’t require an “expert” to make it
Andrea Zittel’s Raugh living environments are large, soft sculpted arrangements that look like landscapes or rock formations. From a distance they sometimes look like realistic granite, but upon a closer viewing look rough, like the raw foam that they are made from. The beauty of Raugh relies on our own evolved social codes that identify and contextualize the designs in our day-to-day lives such as furniture, architecture and clothing. For instance, a few years ago an anthropological study describing how sitting in a chair is actually not the most anatomically comfortable resting position for the human body. But because of social codes (Egyptian rulers sat in chairs, which meant that they had special status) we all think that chairs are just fine. The sense of correctness remains, but the moral and social content/intent has been forgotten.
