The green room

Over the years, the Chicago Furniture Designers Association has hosted group exhibitions of its members' designs. This year, it rearranged its focus. "We decided to pursue a stronger theme," said John Kriegshauser, a professor at IIT's College of Architecture and one of the organizers of the event. "Sustainable Furniture...Chicago Designers Respond," which opens at the Cultural Center, is the 14-year-old organization's largest and most ambitious effort to date.

"It's a chance for everyone to wake up to an emerging design trend," Kriegshauser says. It's a trend that, in brief, is about creating products—and the materials that go into them—that are safe for the home. The motivating forces behind this shift toward eco-living are as much health-related as environmental.

For instance, consumers with chemical sensitivities are looking for furnishings that have not been made with toxic glues or dyes, or sprayed with protective coatings. There are also citizens who are concerned with the growing mounds of waste in landfills and the millions of acres of tropical forests lost every year; who want furnishings made from environmentally managed forests; or who support creative recycling.

The inspiration for the show began with a casual conversation between Kriegshauser and Barry Bursak, a Chicago design consultant and former retailer of home furnishings. Bursak organized the first Sustainable Design Pavilion at the most recent annual Chicago Design Show at the Merchandise Mart, and has spent more than a decade researching and advocating green design. He was invited to make a presentation at a CFDA monthly meeting.

For Bursak, the only design decision that is going to matter in the future, aside from aesthetics, is sustainability. "Design has to think about the effect on the environment," he says. "It's not good design if its not thinking about that."

But change comes slowly, and for most of the members of CFDA, this event was a first attempt to learn about the issue. "We were open to the idea that we were going to have shades of 'green,'" Bursak says.

One entry in this year's exhibition is a wastebasket made from an old tire. Another, titled Human Nest, is a chair made from scraps of old clothing. The judges lit up when they saw it. "Here is someone who is thinking," Bursak says of designer Emily Pilloton's chair. "It was just clever."

A group entry from students at Archeworks is a home-office console made from discarded commercial furniture. Hayworth Furniture, one of the largest office-furniture manufacturers in the country, was getting feedback from clients and dealers who did not want their old stuff to end up in a landfill. By arrangement with the school, it donated a load of standard parts of cubicles, overhead bins, and lots of table and work surfaces. "The challenge was to work with materials that were never designed to be recycled," says Erik Newman, one of the Archeworks team members. The group started out by dissecting the pieces, and eventually "repurposed" the furniture by painting the surfaces and adding new fabric. "We were trying to get away from pink," he says, referring to that awful office mauve.

Newman, a member of CFDA, is also entering his "nomadic furniture"—a little rocking chair and coffee table—under his Happy Human label. His goal is to create pieces that are easy to move. "My basic rule is that it should only take one person to move a piece of furniture," he says.

Half of the "Sustainable Furniture" show entries came from new members, causing CFDA's original membership of about 45 to nearly double. Bursak served as one of the judges along with Thomas Gentry, a professor of architecture at IIT and Lee Weitzman, a furniture designer.

Some of the entries will be pieces of furniture made from urban shade trees, salvaged before they were turned into wood chips. "Every piece in the show demonstrates an aspect of sustainability," Kriegshauser says, "but no one design solves it all."

"Sustainable Furniture...Chicago Designers Respond" opens Saturday 28 at the Chicago Cultural Center.