Karim Rashid and XO Make Extraordinary Family
Extraordinary Family. Designed by Karim Rashid and XO.
In their first collaboration, Karim Rashid and XO decided to raise a little plastic family. Presented at Maison et Objet, the unusual group included Bite Me, Baby Bite, and Z Stool. Shaped from rotomolded polyethylene, the furniture has a decidedly animated look, as if each piece had walked off the frame of an animated Pixar film.
XO’s description of Bite Me isn’t too far off my interpretation: “Bite Me is a zoomorphic organic blobular animated object, to sit in the woods, to bite its soft teeth into your living spaces, to take a bite out of our hectic overworked overzealous day.” The chair’s four legs do, in fact, look like the roots of a pulled tooth. The synthetic progeny of Bite Me, Baby Bite, carries on this imaginary chomping with its trio of legs. Baby Bite can be a stool, side table, or anything else, including an impromptu drum, since two of these pieces fit together to make a bongo-like unit.
If Bite Me and Baby Bite prove too curvy for your taste, a bit too round, then meet Z Stool, the edgy member of Extraordinary Family. Characterized by straight lines and dramatic angles, Z Stool “is confortable, inexpensive, democratic, sensual, minimal and kazual.” Its creation has something rather Frankensteinian about it: “Karim took a basic Z shaped rectangular frame and wrapped it, skinned it, so it has a quality of a metal frame dipped in a liquid, a metalloid, and to transform the hard edged work into an object that although Cartesian, becomes soften.” The polyethylene group is already causing controversy—some responses indicate that Extraordinary Family should stop reproducing! But controversy is something Rashid seems to court, and his plastic children, if they’ve inherited any of Rashid’s genes, should welcome the challenge.
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