Nomadic Furniture

English language

Published Jan. 12, 1974 by Pantheon Books.

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(1 review)

More about how to build and where to buy lightweight furniture that folds, inflates, knocks down, stacks, or is disposable and can be recycled - with many easy to follow illustrations.

9 editions

Nomadic Furniture

Quite mixed feelings about this book. I want very much to like it, but I think it's severely limited by its conception of "nomadism" as moving between apartments every few years.

I get the feeling that this book may have been a victim of its success — many of the designs feel like DIY IKEA furniture, which I'm sure was novel in 1973, more than a decade before IKEA reached the USA. Today, though, it just feels somewhat depressing.

A lot of the book also relies on building furniture from materials that are widely and cheaply available, the idea being that they can be discarded upon moving, and recreated at a destination. Again, this is compatible with a definition of "nomadism" that emphasizes staying put for enough time to scrounge up the cardboard, polyurethane, etc that's needed to put together this furniture. Which is fine, I guess (if a little …