26.02.2013
Árvore Generosa (Giving Tree)

Ethel Leon

The designer Pedro Useche is about to launch, together with the company Taedda, a captivating object: the coat rack called Árvore Generosa, which will be sold disassembled.

Designed to use a certified pinus plate, and to have its cutting at its maximum good use, the tree is easily assembled, requiring only a screwdriver. Two types of screws and two bolts are the connecting elements between the parts. The expectation is that the buyers can easily make the assembly.

The clothes rack has a final shape that holds the originating principles: the cutouts, the puzzle structure, a simplified carpentry and also an anthropomorphic allusion. Maybe slightly remembering the schemes of Bruno Munari in his teachings to draw trees, a central structure that opens into branches.

Here we have smart branches - French hands repeating the design of the feet, overlapping trays, holes that allow different uses. The anthropomorphic to which I refer is not mimetizing human silhouettes, but perceiving objects as our prostheses.

In the design of Pedro Useche past and present are confronted in a curious way.

The rack can accommodate traditional clothing and accessories. This hanger is more evocatively 'multitasking', as shown by the needs of contemporary daily routine.

It is a supporting furniture for so many things that follow us in the daily life, from cell phones to writings, from cereal bars to goggles, vitamins, glasses, keys and cards. The temporary, once restricted to a handful of items, used to signal out and indoors. It used to be only a support for hats, umbrellas, scarves, coats…

Nowadays, daily life has a greater ballast of temporariness and this fugacity won airs of permanence. Our life is permanently temporary, we do not mark appointments in advance without confirming them several times in the last moments ...

We accumulated tasks always delayed. And for such exhaustive and precarious days that Tree of Useche was designed.

Nevertheless, the fact that it is produced with this massive pine board, the cutouts of wood, the traditional carpentry formats (although it´s done with laser-cut) makes us see it as an esteemed, old and solid furniture. Thus the strange curiosity that it provokes.

It is not one of those furnishings that were readapted for new functions and kept the memory on the shell that they once were such as old refrigerators converted into bars, traveler boxes that turned into benches and other types of arrangements that decorators make in the name of preserving a lost memory.

The tree is clearly contemporary, but the project knew how to take advantage of this flavor from the past that the pine and the simple carpentry do print out.

The Giving Tree was named after the children's book from the great cartoonist Shel Silverstein.