Tag Archives: Michael-Jantzen

Someone Designed an Off-Grid Modular Home From a Farm Equipment Catalog

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The search for affordable, sustainable housing tends to produce two kinds of proposals. The first involves entirely new materials, new manufacturing processes, and supply chains that don’t yet exist at useful scale. The second starts with what’s already available and asks a different question of it. The latter approach is rarer, and when it works, it tends to produce something far more buildable than even the most elegant custom solution.

The Homestead House belongs to that second category. This conceptual design takes the prefabricated steel arch building system ordinarily found on agricultural properties, and reorganizes it into a modular, off-grid residential structure. The system is already commercially available, already engineered for structural strength, and already fire-resistant. The concept doesn’t ask for anything to be invented; it simply redirects what already exists.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

The arches and straight panels are formed from thin, recyclable steel sheets that bolt together with simple tools, requiring no skilled labor and no secondary support structure. The resulting shell is extremely strong despite using very little material. More usefully, it comes apart the same way it goes together. A structure built this way can be fully disassembled and reassembled somewhere else for an entirely different purpose, which makes the material itself far more durable in the life-of-a-building sense than most conventional construction.

Modularity is central to how the Homestead House adapts over time. The individual arched modules cluster in different configurations to suit different needs, and the footprint isn’t fixed at the time of construction. A household that grows doesn’t have to move; rooms can be added one module or even one arch at a time. The structure can equally be reduced if circumstances change, making it genuinely responsive to the way life actually shifts over the years.

Insulating the steel shell involves erecting a second, lighter-gauge structure inside the outer one and blowing cellulose insulation, made from recycled newspaper, between the two layers to whatever depth the climate demands. The thickness is entirely adjustable, which means the same structural system works for a mild coastal site and an exposed inland location where winters are more severe. It’s a low-tech solution that works with the building’s logic rather than against it.

The concept is designed to operate completely off the standard utility grid. Electricity comes from photovoltaic cells and a vertical-axis wind turbine. Passive solar design handles heating and cooling, domestic water is solar-heated, and rainwater collected from the roof arches feeds above- or below-ground storage. More advanced options, including solar- and wind-powered hydrogen production, are also part of the broader energy framework the concept envisions.

What holds the design together philosophically is the idea that a new manufacturing facility isn’t required to produce affordable, sustainable housing. The arch building system already exists, already has infrastructure behind it, and already serves an industry that needs strong, low-cost structures assembled quickly. Borrowing that system for a different purpose avoids the resource cost of starting from scratch, which is one of the less-discussed obstacles in alternative construction.

The Homestead House raises practical questions that most sustainable housing proposals never have to answer. It doesn’t ask for new materials, new tools, or new supply chains. It asks instead what happens when you apply a different kind of imagination to what’s already sitting in a farm equipment catalog.

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The Luxury Hotel Concept That Works Like a Food Truck for Wilderness

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Luxury hotels have always had a location problem. The kinds of places that would make the most extraordinary backdrops, remote desert plains, rolling highland meadows, dramatic canyon edges, are almost never the places where a hotel can legally or practically be built. Extending infrastructure to those sites, from power grids to road access to permanent foundations, tends to either cost too much or damage the very landscape that made the location worth visiting.

The Mobiltels concept approaches hospitality from a completely different direction. Rather than building a permanent structure and hoping the location is compelling enough, each Mobiltel unit is designed to fold into a compact, truck-towable trailer, be driven to wherever the landscape is most remarkable, and then unfold into a functioning luxury accommodation. When the stay is over, it packs up and leaves without leaving much evidence behind.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

Three distinct unit types make up the proposed resort ecosystem. The first is the guest accommodation module, which deploys into two full hotel-style rooms, each with a private bath and its own private deck. The roof extends into a communal deck shaded by solar panels that generate the electricity to power the unit, while a second panel mounted on the exterior heats the water. The entire structure, decks and all, folds back into a trailer tight enough to tow down a highway.

The second unit is a solar-powered café and coffee shop that unfolds to reveal four outdoor dining decks with full kitchen and restroom facilities. The third is a large shade structure intended for gatherings, private events, and communal lounging, built as a striking open lattice that collapses into a flat-load trailer for transport. Additional unit types can theoretically follow the same logic, meaning a full resort amenity list could be assembled and disassembled as needed.

The off-grid energy system is what makes the location independence real rather than theoretical. Every unit generates and manages its own power and heated water from the sun, which means no connecting to local utilities and no requiring a serviced campsite. A Mobiltel cluster can go where a road exists and terrain is flat enough to level a trailer, which is a much lower bar than conventional construction.

The environmental argument is also embedded in the temporariness. A permanent hotel in a wilderness setting modifies that setting permanently. Roads are built, foundations are poured, and the land around the structure gradually changes to accommodate the infrastructure. A Mobiltel unit lands on a site for a season, its occupants absorb the specific quality of that place, and it leaves. The landscape recovers. The next location gets the same treatment.

There’s something quietly subversive about applying a mobile home chassis to a luxury hospitality concept. Mobile homes occupy a very specific cultural position, one that doesn’t usually include rooftop communal decks and solar-heated private baths. The Mobiltels concept borrows the transport logic of one and applies it to the aesthetic ambitions of the other, with the result that a high-end resort becomes as relocatable as a food truck. The result sits somewhere between architecture and expedition equipment, which is probably exactly the right place for it.

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Funnels That Harvest Rain and Solar Power While Shading a Public Plaza

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Water scarcity and urban heat are two separate crises that public infrastructure rarely addresses together. Most public spaces are designed primarily for social use, with sustainability features treated as additions bolted on during planning approvals. The result is civic furniture that looks environmentally conscious on paper but often functions in ways that keep each system largely isolated from the others.

The Solar Rain Funnels propose a different model. Each funnel-shaped structure is a prefabricated, modular unit made from galvanized steel that collects rainwater, generates solar electricity, and provides shaded public seating, all from the same form. Rather than treating harvesting and gathering as separate programs, the design bundles them into a single object that does each job without architectural compromise.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

The form does most of the work. Each funnel is wide at the top and narrows toward the base, which means its surface naturally directs rainfall inward and downward into collection channels. Solar cells line the top edge, capturing sunlight from the same surface that intercepts rain. A bench is mounted around the perimeter at the base, completing the third function without requiring a separate structure.

What’s collected below the surface matters as much as what happens above it. Rainwater storage containers, or diversion channels connecting to off-site containment, are installed under the plaza to hold water for later community use. The solar electricity powers the pump that moves water from storage and lights the funnels after dark. Excess power feeds into the local grid, and on-site batteries let visitors charge devices.

The prefabricated and modular nature of the design means installation doesn’t require building a new structure from scratch each time. Each funnel arrives at the site in pre-made sections that bolt together, and any number of units can be arranged into any configuration the site allows. In the reference proposal, seven funnels are arranged in a grid over a plaza, with drought-tolerant garden plantings filling the spaces between them.

That plaza arrangement gives visitors something more useful than just shade. The overhead canopy formed by the funnel array blocks enough direct sunlight to make the space comfortable in hot, arid conditions, which is significant given that the concept is intended for communities experiencing water stress. Gardens planted with low-water-consuming species fill the gaps between funnels, making the plaza functional as a green space even in dry climates.

Size is treated as a variable rather than a fixed specification, because the concept anticipates installation across different kinds of sites. A smaller cluster of funnels might serve a neighborhood corner or transit stop, while a larger array could anchor a civic plaza or regional park. The galvanized steel construction and bolted assembly make each installation relatively straightforward to adapt, scale, and transport to wherever it’s needed most.

The concept is currently unbuilt, but what distinguishes it from other multi-function proposals is that each function follows directly from the form rather than being added to it. The wide, concave top collects rain. The exposed edge holds solar cells. The shaded base provides seating. Nothing requires the structure to be shaped any differently to perform those jobs, which is the kind of efficiency that makes a proposal feel plausible.

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Get Ready for the Pavilion That Was Designed by the Sun Itself

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Architecture has always had to reckon with the sun. Buildings are oriented, shaded, and glazed in response to it, and solar panels are bolted onto them afterward. In most cases, the sun’s behavior is accommodated rather than consulted. The resulting forms come from a designer’s intentions and a structural engineer’s calculations, with sunlight as something to manage rather than the thing that generates the shape itself.

The Sun Shadow Pavilion starts from a different premise. Before any walls were drawn or a floor plan drafted, a scale model of a large square array of photovoltaic solar panels was placed above a flat white surface facing south. The sun then did the rest. The shadows it cast on that surface, traced every hour for eight hours as it crossed the sky, became the raw material for the entire structure.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

Eight shadow outlines, each representing a different hour of the day, were converted into three-dimensional forms. Solid planes were inserted from the edges of each shadow up to the edges of the solar panels above, creating a set of inclined surfaces that defined the interior volume. That enclosed space, shaped by accumulated light and time rather than a stylist’s instinct, became the pavilion.

The design is also inherently site-specific and date-specific. If built, the shadows used to generate its form would be traced on the actual opening day, at the exact build location. A pavilion in the American Southwest, traced on a different opening date, would look different from one in northern Europe, or from the same structure inaugurated a decade earlier or later. Each built version would be unrepeatable.

The exterior form that results from this particular study is dramatic and unmistakably asymmetric, a cluster of dark, angled, sloping planes radiating outward from the flat solar array at the top. The interior is a complete reversal. The translucent solar cells that generate all of the pavilion’s power also filter light through the roof, keeping the space naturally bright during the public hours the shadow tracings were drawn to represent.

Walking through, the floor carries painted outlines of all eight shadow positions, so the exact geometry that produced the walls above can be read directly underfoot. The building’s origin story isn’t hidden in a design brief or a notebook; it’s painted on the ground you’re standing on. The structure explains itself to anyone willing to look down as well as up.

Beyond the solar panels, the structure handles its own climate without mechanical systems. The dark outer surface absorbs heat, and a double-skin wall construction moves warm or cool air into and away from the interior as needed. Rainwater collected from the exterior surfaces feeds underground storage tanks for use on-site. The pavilion’s stated purpose, to display advances in alternative energy technology, is also its operating model.

There’s an honesty to the whole approach that’s relatively rare in landmark building design. Most structures acquire their form through aesthetic decisions, historical references, or personal sensibility. This one derived its shape from a physical process that would have happened regardless of any design intention. The sun was going to cast those shadows anyway. The design simply had the sense to use them.

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Public Art Stands Still, This Steel House Lets You Slide It Apart

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Public art installations in parks have a familiar relationship with the people passing through them. They hold a fixed position, a fixed meaning, and a fixed form. You walk around them, read a plaque if there is one, and that’s usually the end of the conversation. The ones designed to provoke a genuine reaction tend to depend on scale or spectacle rather than something the visitor can actually change.

The Interactive Sliced House is part of a series that uses the most recognizable architectural shape there is as raw material. The house silhouette, walls, a pitched roof, and a doorway centered in front, is so deeply familiar that it functions almost like a word. This installation doesn’t just reference that shape. It cuts the whole thing into eight vertical slices and puts visitors in charge of what happens next.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

Two of the eight slices are solid white steel panels, one anchoring each end of the structure, both fixed permanently to a concrete pad on the ground. Each solid end has a doorway cut into its center. The six slices between them are open frames, the same house shape rendered as a hollow silhouette, and these slide freely along tracks set into the concrete beneath them.

Slide those six frames to one end, and the house snaps back into something close to its recognizable form, dense and legible from a distance. Pull them apart, and they scatter across the pad, creating a sequence of house-shaped thresholds that repeat across the concrete like the same word written over and over with increasing space between each letter. The structure stays the same; the space it makes changes completely.

Someone walking through the installation when the frames are spread out passes through threshold after threshold, each one framing a slightly different view of the park, the sky, and anyone else nearby. The frames create enclosed corridors between them when pushed together, and open, almost ceremonial passageways when pulled apart. Moving through the structure is different every visit, depending on how previous visitors left it.

The house shape is the installation’s real subject. It’s one of the first symbols children learn to draw, and one of the most loaded in the human symbolic vocabulary: shelter, family, belonging, property. Breaking it apart and handing the fragments to strangers in a public park is a way of asking what it means without having to say the question out loud, and without prescribing the answer.

The white painted steel keeps everything visually consistent regardless of how the slices are arranged, meaning no single configuration reads as more “correct” than another. There isn’t a right answer built into the materials. The installation can also be deployed as multiples, several units placed across a park at once, which would multiply its questions the same way the frames multiply the house shape when pulled apart.

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What If the Internet Had a Building You Could Actually Walk Inside?

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The internet has always been invisible. It moves information at a scale and speed the human mind can’t fully grasp, yet we access it through the most ordinary of interfaces: a flat screen, a pair of earphones, a keyboard. Nothing about how we physically engage with it reflects the enormity of what it represents, or what it means to be connected to the entire world from a single chair.

Michael Jantzen’s Internet Observatory concept addresses that disconnect directly by building a physical structure around the idea of internet access. Placed outdoors, the structure uses its architectural form to stand in for the abstract mechanics of the web. The outer support grid frame represents the internet’s matrix, while the curved space it encloses represents where a person enters and engages with the flow of information.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

You reach the interior by climbing a staircase up to an elevated platform and stepping inside the curved shell. At its center sits an interactive workstation that rises through a glass floor and can also rotate along the floor’s surface, letting the person inside face in any direction. It’s a deliberately simple setup that places one person at the physical center of a structure designed to represent the entire internet.

All of the large curved panels that form the enclosing space can be automatically repositioned around the occupant. The core can be fully open, fully closed, or any variation in between, depending on the activity. Some configurations allow for projecting images and sounds from the internet or the main computer onto the surrounding panels, turning the interior into a fully immersive display environment.

Some of those projected images also appear on the exterior faces of the panels, making what happens inside the structure visible to anyone nearby. A private internet session becomes something closer to a public exhibition, with the curved panels acting as screens that anyone outside the grid frame can see. The distinction between the individual’s experience and the community’s visibility gets built directly into the architecture.

Each structure would also have its own website, through which people could visit and interact with it remotely in real time, selecting images and sounds to be projected inside or directing the movement of the panels. Someone seated at the workstation might find the content surrounding them being shaped by a stranger thousands of miles away. The structure becomes a live, physical interface for the collaborative possibilities of the internet.

The design also contemplates many of these structures existing simultaneously around the world, each publicly or privately owned, all communicating with each other as they interact with their respective occupants. What begins as one architectural statement scales into a distributed global network, a physical version of the very internet it represents, built from steel frames and curved panels rather than servers and cables.

Jantzen calls this a “symbolic temple for the computer age,” and there’s something deliberate in that description. Climbing a staircase, entering a curved space, and sitting at the center while content from around the world flows around you is a kind of ritual that a laptop screen doesn’t offer. It’s an architectural argument for what it might feel like if the internet had a home you could walk into.

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Art-ware Is the Dining Set That Never Has to Go in a Cabinet

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Tableware has always had a storage problem. A complete set of cups, bowls, and cutlery takes up a cabinet’s worth of space for the privilege of being used a few times a week. The rest of the time, it sits behind closed doors, out of sight and contributing nothing to the space around it. That’s a lot of material devoted to a fairly passive existence.

Michael Jantzen’s Art-ware prototype takes a different approach to the same set of objects. Rather than designing tableware that gets put away after a meal, he designed a system where the dishes, cups, and cutlery connect to each other and become something else entirely: freestanding abstract sculptures that live out in the open, doubling as décor when they’re not being used for eating and drinking.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

The key to the whole system is a set of male and female connectors molded directly into each piece. These are simple protrusions that stick out from the surfaces of the bowls, cups, and cutlery handles, allowing any component to plug into or stack onto any other. A bowl can lock onto a cup, a cup onto another cup, cutlery can stand upright in an opening or connect through a handle, and the whole assembly stays together without any separate hardware.

The configurations that result don’t look accidental. Cups stacked and plugged together form vertical columns; bowls assembled at various orientations create clusters that read as organic, almost biomorphic forms. Slide cutlery upright through the assembled pieces, and the resulting structure starts to resemble a piece of abstract art you’d find mounted in a gallery, not something you’d normally find next to a kitchen sink.

That’s precisely what Jantzen is after. The Art-ware set doesn’t need to be stored in a cabinet because the assembled form is meant to sit on a shelf or table as a decorative object, a sculpture that also happens to be a dining set. You pull it apart before a meal and reassemble it afterward in whatever configuration suits you that day. No two arrangements have to be the same.

The material is recyclable plastic, and Jantzen frames the concept in straightforward sustainability terms: one product that performs multiple functions uses fewer resources than two separate products doing the same jobs independently. There’s no dedicated storage unit needed, no extra display piece required. The dining set is the décor, and the décor is the dining set.

Art-ware is a prototype and the first in a planned series of designs that expand the idea further. The concept is broad enough to go well beyond tableware, and Jantzen has spent decades applying this kind of thinking to furniture, architecture, and public installations. The dining set is a compact version of the same logic: objects that commit fully to their function while quietly doing something else on the side.

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This Rotating Solar House Grows Fish and Plants Entirely on Its Own

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Aquaponic gardening has been getting a lot of attention as a more sustainable way to grow food, especially in urban settings where arable land isn’t exactly plentiful. The concept pairs fish and plants in a closed-loop system where each supports the other, cutting out synthetic fertilizers and reducing water waste. Most implementations, though, tend to be utilitarian and aren’t built to handle seasonal changes without significant supplemental energy input.

That’s the problem Michael Jantzen’s Eco-Aquaponic House was designed to tackle. Built as a public exhibit for a botanical garden, it functions more like a machine than a greenhouse, engineered to grow fish and plants together in an energy-efficient and largely self-sustaining way. Jantzen, whose work merges art, architecture, technology, and sustainable design, has been experimenting with this kind of thinking for over 50 years.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

The system works on a simple but elegant biological loop. Fish waste is cycled through the roots of the surrounding plants as a natural fertilizer. The plants filter the water, which then returns to the fish tank. The cycle repeats continuously with minimal outside input, keeping both fish and plants alive. It’s the kind of closed-loop food production that makes conventional growing methods look rather wasteful by comparison.

What makes the structure particularly clever is how it manages growing conditions year-round without demanding much energy. Six sections rotate around a central pivot point, each serving a different climate function. Two insulated panels wrap around the interior during cold nights to retain heat. Two shade screen sections shield the plants on hot days. Two glass sections open to let in outside air when conditions allow.

The passive thermal management doesn’t stop there. Built around the perimeter of the stationary base are large tubes filled with a heat-retention material that absorbs solar energy during the day and releases it slowly at night, helping keep the fish and plants warm through winter without relying on active heating systems. Those same tubes also moderate daytime temperatures, preventing the interior from overheating when the sun is strong.

On top sits a sun-tracking solar cell array that follows the sun throughout the day, supplying most of the structure’s electrical needs, including the large lamp hung over the central fish tank. Small windows built into the glass sections allow for additional ventilation control when the glass is in the closed position, letting you fine-tune interior conditions depending on what the fish and plants need at any given time.

Inside, plant trays are built into the perimeter of the structure, forming a ring of greenery around the central cylindrical fish tank. Visitors to the botanical garden can get a sense of the system from the outside, or arrange private tours for a closer look from inside through the rear entry door. As a public exhibit, it’s designed as much to teach people about aquaponic gardening as it is to actually grow. It’s a growing facility that takes care of itself season after season, with very little outside intervention required.

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Giant Sculptures Look Like Machines but, Nobody Knows What They Do

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Most public sculptures ask you to stand in front of them and feel something, usually reverence, awe, or a vague sense of civic pride. They represent people, events, or abstract ideals, but they rarely suggest function. A figure cast in bronze doesn’t appear to be doing anything, and that’s largely the point. The statue commemorates; it doesn’t operate. The relationship between viewer and object is, by design, entirely passive.

Michael Jantzen had a different idea. The Santa Fe-based designer set out to create public sculptures that look like they’re built to do something, even if no one, including Jantzen himself, can say what that something is. The result is the Monumental Engines of Creation, a concept series drawing from the visual language of high-technology hardware, assembled into objects that feel purposeful, alien, and oddly believable all at once.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

The design process is telling. Jantzen didn’t start with a function and work backward to a form, as industrial designers typically do. He built the pieces intuitively, combining various components into composites that simply suggest some kind of high-level intelligence at work. The question of what they might actually be for was deliberately left unanswered, and that open-endedness is precisely what gives the series its strange pull.

Standing near one of these sculptures, you’d spend a while trying to decode it. Jantzen’s hope is that viewers engage with the objects and find themselves genuinely wondering about their origin, their creators, and their purpose. That kind of sustained curiosity is harder to provoke than it sounds. Most public sculptures deliver their meaning almost immediately; these deliberately withhold it, rewarding prolonged attention with more questions rather than answers.

Part of why that works is scale. Each piece in the series is intentionally gigantic, dwarfing any person nearby to the point of near insignificance. That proportion isn’t accidental; Jantzen designed the scale to convey the symbolic weight of each object relative to its imagined function. A machine built to scatter the seeds of creativity throughout the universe, the thinking goes, should probably look the part.

There’s something worth sitting with in the idea that creativity itself deserves monuments. Most of what we commemorate in public space is history, politics, or governance. Jantzen’s machines point somewhere else, toward imagination, invention, and the strange optimism embedded in building. They don’t ask to be understood. They ask to be wondered at, which turns out to be a different, and arguably more honest, kind of public art.

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This Coffee Table Turns Into Abstract Sculpture by Loosening 2 Knobs

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Furniture has always had a love-hate relationship with art. Some pieces are so carefully considered in form that they become objects of admiration, almost too precious to actually use. Others are purely utilitarian and couldn’t care less about looking good. Few pieces try to genuinely blur that line, but that’s the territory experimental artist and designer Michael Jantzen has been working in for decades.

His Interactive Segmented Tables are a compelling example of that approach. These aren’t concepts or prototypes; they’re actual, built furniture that sits in a room and waits for you to decide what they should be. At any given moment, they can work as a proper low table for a drink or a book, and with a few turns of their knobs, transform into something that belongs in a gallery.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

The mechanism behind this is disarmingly simple. Each table is made up of identical segments threaded along a center support rod, held in place by two disc-shaped knobs on either end. Loosen those knobs, and you can rotate each segment independently into any configuration you like. Each segment has at least one flat side, so aligning enough of them with flat faces pointing upward turns the whole thing into a stable surface.

This is where the tables stop being passive objects and start being tools of expression. You might rotate the segments into something visually striking when guests arrive, then pull them flat when you need an actual surface for a lamp or a tray. The piece adapts to the occasion rather than the other way around, which is rarely something a table can honestly claim to do.

What makes this even more interesting is that the segments are two-toned, so rotating them doesn’t just change the table’s shape; it also shifts its color pattern. A configuration that shows one dominant tone can open up into a mix of both with a single rearrangement. You could work with the same piece for years and never feel like you’ve fully exhausted what it can look like.

The Interactive Segmented Tables also aren’t locked into a single form factor. Jantzen designed them to be available in many different sizes and table shapes, and they can be made from a range of materials. This means the same essential concept can translate into very different objects, depending on what a space or an owner calls for, without losing what makes them worth owning in the first place.

For anyone tired of furniture that commits too hard to a single personality, these tables offer something different. There’s a quiet pleasure in knowing you can reach down, loosen two knobs, and change what’s sitting in your living room without buying anything new. Few objects manage to be this honest about the fact that taste and function aren’t always fixed, and that’s a more useful quality than it sounds.

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