Paul Sullivan designs
Steel chaise, 2000 cartwheel rims, very dull sawmill blade framents, steel rod, bolt 5’ x 8’ x 4’
Before Landes Sullivan, my interests were sculpture and design.
I usually began a design wondering how to show off…
. . . the strength, utility or structure of a material or object. The steel chaise started with the pair of steel cartwheel rims. They’re so springy that I wanted to bounce or sit on them. Without some sort of support, however, it wouldn’t be long before they deformed to oval shaped.
Professor Gordon
I came across some sections of a discarded lumber mill saw blade. (The teeth were quite dull.) They provide the seating. Where the blades are welded to the cartwheels the latter are quite rigid, and the rest of the circumference is stiff enough. Creep is minimized. The most inspiring design book I read is by a structural engineer, J E Gordon called Structures: or Why Things Don’t Fall Down. Trying to think in simple engineering terms greatly informed my design sense.
Magazine rack of bent wood (3 layers of 1/8” plywood bent wet without heat around a form and glued), laboriously and elegantly bent square steel rod and magnets shown on the roof at 111 First Street in Jersey City
vase of aerials, table of planes, fan blade for wine
The aerial vase - Aerials are continously adjustable, but they’re always either fully extended or full retracted. I wanted to make use of that infinite adjustability. For the 5 pounds or so of flowers, pot and water, I needed 6 aerials to resist retraction. I only needed 4 as long as the weight of f, p and w, pushes the aerials into a spiraling twist. That naturally occurring twist gave the aerials heightened resistance by curving the aerials and making htem more horziontal.
The table’s challenge was to make a pack flat item that required no tools to assemble.
Broken fan blade wine holder - I looked at the broken fan blade until I finally wondered, “What would Alexander Calder do with this?”
These pieces were designed and built between 1999 and 2007. I think they’re in chronological order.
