Nature embalmed (1)

Invited in early 2009 by London’s Design Museum to participate in the annual Designers in Residence programme, culminating in an exhibition of the works created during the residency, architect Asif Khan set himself an untypical brief: to harvest the materials necessary for his installation from the streets of London. No great innovation – reuse and recycle design projects abound – if it were not for the fact that in this case the material was Gypsophila, a flowering plant of the Caryophyllaceae family frequently to be found growing untended on the verges of London’s streets and sidewalks. Transforming flowers into furniture, according to Khan, responds to a desire to merge familiarity and innovation by exploring new contexts and new uses for familiar materials. Gypsophila was Khan’s material of choice – 500 were evaluated – not only for its fragile beauty but also for the intricate density of its stems, which give it excellent space-filling qualities. The use of an organic material, however, posed multiple challenges: how could such a diaphanous material be given structural integrity? How to encapsulate and immortalise the fleeting beauty of the flowers once plucked, before decomposition sets in? To answer the latter question, Khan sought advice from Gunther von Hagens’s Institute for Plastination, the originators of the notorious “Body Worlds” exhibitions that showcase stripped-away human corpses in lifelike poses – a feat made possible by the fact that von Hagens holds US patent 4,205,059: Animal and vegetal tissues permanently preserved by synthetic resin impregnation. The process of plastination essentially transforms organic materials into plastic by extracting every molecule of water in the tissue and replacing it with a polymer: an almost alchemic process that, if executed quickly enough after death, preserves an organism’s lifelike appearances in eternity. The limited lifespan of the Gypsophila meant that the plants needed to be given their final form, and the plastination process initiated, as quickly as possible after collection. A team of collaborators was employed to trim the stems, weave them together into modules and insert them into moulds. These moulds were then inserted into Europe’s largest freezedrying chamber (all the furniture was designed specifically to the maximum dimensions of this unit): through a series of oscillations in the chamber’s temperature, ranging from +30° to –50° C, over a period of three weeks 99 per cent of the plants’ water content was removed. To give structure to each object, four coats of linseedoil- based resin were then sprayed on; after each coat, the furniture was baked under UV lamps, gradually building up its structural integrity. The resulting furniture is remarkably light: each chair weighs a mere 200 grams. Khan considers these pieces to be research prototypes, a waypoint on the road towards production rather than a completed design proposal. Numerous obstacles stand between the concept generated during the Design Museum residency and mass production, but for the moment Khan claims to be more interested in the concept and process: sampling familiar, ethereal fragments of the city and bringing them, through a process of scientific détournement, into our everyday lives.

Nature embalmed (1)

Asif Khan’s latest project gives a whole new meaning to the word “recycling”. Through a process of impregnation that transforms organic materials into imperishable plastics, London’s plant life is transformed into a raw material for everyday products. Text Joseph Grima

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