Democratic Design: The Work of Le Van Bo

Van Bo Le-Mentzel arrived on the shores of Germany as a young refugee from Laos. He was fascinated by Spiderman and dreamed of the day when he could help the helpless. Today, he still prefers to wear blue and red, in homage to his superhero, and—after studying architecture at Beuth Hochschule, a University of Applied Sciences in the working class Wedding district of Berlin—has found a way to emulate him. Like Peter Parker, he has a day job, though Van Bo has a few: as a celebrated hip hop-rapping MC, a prolific radio and television show broadcaster, a graffiti-artist, a social media king and ambassador for startnext.de, the German version of Kickstarter, and as a full-time employee at Dan Pearlman Communications and Branding. By night—and this is the Spiderman part—he moonlights as a guerilla furniture designer. Inspired by Berlin’s Bauhaus legacy and the cool factor of DIY, he creates the plans for beautiful, affordable furniture and releases them for free from his website hartzivmoebel.de. “This gives the power to the people to make their world a more aesthetic, more social, more uplifting place, without government, police or multinational interference,” he says. “They are plans for happiness—and change starts with you.” In exchange for the free plans, he has asked the furniture makers to send him pictures of their finished products along with stories of its making and uses. The result is the book Le-Mentzel & The Crowd: Hartz IV Moebel.com, published by Hatje Cantz in July—a delightfully inventive showcase of a brave new world where virtual crowds and furniture can change your life.

Slideshow

“I read a story about a student in a small one-bedroom apartment who because she could only fit her big bed and her desk in the apartment, was too ashamed to invite her friends or her parents over,” remembers Van Bo about his inspiration for this crafty ensemble of furniture. “There was nowhere to cook, nowhere to sit, not even space for standard chairs to fit. It made me think ‘Where do we find the instruction manual for how to use a small space?’ We buy a new computer or a new vacuum cleaner and we are given instructions. But nobody teaches us how to use space”. So he designed plans for a small one-bedroom apartment that included a room-dividing piece (the Siwo Couch) that functions as an all-in-one couch, pull-out king size bed and bench that seats six to nine people, a miraculously problem-solving invention, along with custom-sized smaller chairs that double as tables. “Design is a social issue,” says Van Bo, “it facilitates or negates social interaction depending on its cleverness, use and beauty. Wohnung makes socializing possible and enjoyable in a small space, on a small budget”.

This small (1 square meter at the bottom) house-shaped construction can be just about anything. It has wheels, so it is transportable (in Berlin there are no subway turnstiles, so people wheel their 1SQM houses across town by train). It can turn to the side to be a bed or on its back to be a kitchen. In Berlin, it has been sighted in offices as a personal rest space, and on the streets as an open-air pancake kitchen. Amy McKinney, a visiting New Zealander, is running a coffee shop, Koha Café, out of hers, and sleeping in it at night. East Seven Hostel has three 1 SQM Houses on their front lawn that hostel visitors rent for 1 euro a night.

The Potential of Van Bo's 'One Square Meter House'

Designer Van Bo Le-Mentzel takes a philosophical approach to the small housing movement, devising plans for a portable living space that occupies just one square meter.
New Olds at Israeli Design Museum

There's an interesting new museum in Israel, just south of Tel Aviv, with a corkscrewing exterior of rust-red Cor-Ten steel: Design Museum Holon, designed by Ron Arad.
Robert Hammond: Chance Encounters

Robert Hammond has just returned from a year in Rome. While there he created an urban experiment called Chance Encounter on the Tiber, involving 100 chairs in public spaces in Italy.
Timeless Design: Future Perfect

Marcel Breuer’s Wassily chair, the Eames lounge chair, George Nelson’s Ball clock, and Giancarlo Mattioli’s Nesso lamp are just a few of the prodigious products that one might claim…