James Piatt, Art and Design

Bag Chair

1998

A folding chair I designed that employs a collapsible tensile structure.

Illuminator

2013

Acrylic

14GA Lounge

2010

powder coated steel

Oddly enough in the past I worked as a sheet metal engineer at a factory for nine months which I believe inspired this design. Also in reaction to all of the minimalist furniture designs I was interested in introducing elements from early 20th century arts and crafts.

Purist Suite

2001

Bathroom faucet, sink and furniture for Kohler

Saeta Lounge Chair

1997

maple and cherry veneered plywood

I utilized a CNC machine as well as a table saw to construct this lounge that can nest to reduce its overall size or for storing purposes. Its name comes from a Miles Davis track on Sketches of Spain.

Stacked Shades

1997

I was very much into appropriating existing objects then. The standard lampshade repeated vertically to create a column or something similar to a Japanese lantern.

Siamese Lamp

1999

Pytheas Vacuum Airship 2019

Pytheas named after an Ancient Greek geographer is a recent proposal I made to NASA’s JPL for sending robotic vacuum airships to Mars in order to cover vast distances, gather soil samples and return them to Earth. I based the concept on an idea proposed by John-Paul Clarke, Director of the Air Transportation Laboratory at Georgia Tech. I read about it and saw a basic napkin sketch and thought it would be fascinating to explore it further to see how a mission like this would work and what it would look like. The basic principle is if you can remove the atmosphere from a volume it becomes buoyant allowing you to float a robot over the surface.

Playn Orphosis Backpack

2022

Strike Table

2000

Acrylic and bowling balls

Broom Chair

1998

stainless steel, flagged push brooms

At the time I was very much interested in Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades and Italian Neofunctionalism. Many of my ideas tend to appropriate existing objects or ideas and transform them in some way. In this case soft, flagged push broom heads are turned upright and used to support someone’s weight and cushion them. The user interacts with an unusual surface they haven’t felt before but was always present.

Exhibited at NeoCon in Chicago and at the Gallery of Functional Art at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica.

Dark Energy Shade

2014

Paper

There is a mysterious force that is causing the universe to increase its rate of expansion. This shade was constructed with laser cut card stock panels that interlock together. The many small apertures project inverted images of the lamps filament.