The New Room: No Furniture

To most people, furnishing a new house or apartment is an expensive, sometimes traumatic experience--where to put the chairs, how to arrange the sofas in the conversation area, and what decorating style to choose. A growing number of architect-designers may have found the solution to these troublesome questions: no furniture at all. Man's earliest shelter was a cave with a rock to sit on, and perhaps it gave him more peace of mind than a cluttered room in a contemporary home.

"Chairs, for example, create rigid environments," explains Thomas Luckey, 31, a New Haven environmental architect. "Because chairs are in fixed locations, they limit your options as to where to sit." In most rooms that Luckey and his colleagues design, conventional furniture is replaced by lumps, bumps and other more or less organized protrusions that serve as chairs, couches, tables and shelves. "The basic formula," says Charles Moore, former dean of Yale's School of Architecture and now a practicing architect in New Haven, "is to design an environment that is relatively cheap, comfortable and useful." After that, he says, "almost anything goes." Some of the more remarkable examples:

MULTILEVEL PLATFORMS. Architect Michael Black was called in by Harold Slavkin, a Los Angeles molecular biologist, to plan a vacation house. He disposed of all furniture, building a complex of multilevel platforms covered with carpeting. Now guests sit, lie or sprawl, and flop from one tier to another as conversations catch their interest. "In a 10-ft. by 12-ft. area," says Slavkin's wife Kay, "we've had as many as twelve people in practically as many postures." Black also revamped the Slavkins' staid, traditional Los Angeles house. "The problem," he says, "was a cold, formal living room and warm, informal people." Once again, he used platforms to replace furniture. "The first time people see it," says Kay Slavkin, "they just stand and gawk."

THE TIERED EFFECT. Architect Raymond Kappe's California home carries the tiered effect even further, with floors of one room becoming sofas (also tables, chairs and beds) for another. "You can sit on the edge of the drawing room and dangle your feet into the studio," says Kappe. "There are so many places for people to sit or sprawl that we can entertain a hundred and still retain intimacy."

MOVABLE COLUMN. New Haven Architect Luckey has designed an 8-ft.-long, 6-ft.-diameter column that can be used in various ways. In a horizontal position, it serves as a bed or a couch; when it is lifted to a vertical position, the interior can be used as a dressing space, storage area or simply as a place to read in peace.

URETHANE BLOCKS. St. Louis Architect Terrence Cashen has furnished his living room with two dozen 1-ft. by 2-ft. urethane blocks, lit it with two strings of naked light bulbs, and mirrored two opposite walls to reflect blocks and bulbs receding into infinity. Cashen sits, sleeps and eats on them. The unmirrored walls are white, carpet and cubes charcoal gray. "The lack of color," says Cashen, "makes people more important because they add color."

COMMUNICATION CUBE. A group of designers at California State College in Long Beach has designed a "communication cube" that replaces all the furniture in a small room. It stands 7 ft. on a 3-ft. module and has adjustable horizontal and vertical partitions. Up to nine people can sit in it, loll on its shelves and "communicate." Ideal for transients, the cube can be dismantled, piled into the car and moved to the next apartment.

THE LIBERATING CUBE. Functional Ken Isaacs, an architecture instructor at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle campus, believes that environments offer a means of liberation. "Too many guys," he says, "are imprisoned in and by their $40,000 homes. Like my students, they might find liberation in a 4-ft. cube." Two of the four shelves inside the cube can form a seat while the others fasten into the moldings to form a desk or table. Later, a bed can be made of a pair of shelves--the sleeper's feet extend through a side-window flap. Another variation: a student can open a roof flap, stick head and shoulders out and use the roof as a desk. Cost of an Isaacs cube: about $35.

ALL-CORK LINING. Ettore Sottsass Jr., a thoughtful Milanese designer intent upon creating an environment that is a "diagram of psychic processes, a therapeutic act," is now completing a Milan apartment lined with cork-faced linoleum, without furniture save for kitchen and bath fixtures.

The toilet is enclosed in an undulate black fiber-glass column that rises to the ceiling. There are no walls between sleeping, living and bath areas, which are raised two steps above the sitting and eating zones.

POLYURETHANE CAVE. Several Manhattan designers have an answer for those who literally want to return to the simplicity of the cave. They spray polyurethane foam over wire, burlap and wood forms--or even balloons --strategically placed in a room. Within a day, the stuff hardens into a tough, mildew-proof mass with planned recesses and protrusions that take the place of furniture. The corners of windows are filled in, leaving a rounded opening, and the sills are comfortably padded. The total effect, say those who live in the caves, is like a womb with a view.

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