For two nights in November, the former site of San Luis Obispo’s California Pizza Kitchen on Marsh Street transformed into a sprawling furniture showcase. Slim cabinets and repurposed wood stools sat atop old dining booths while floor lamps and tabletop lighting bathed the space in a warm yellowed glow.
Architecture professor Tom Di Santo said the space at the vacant California Pizza Kitchen was dense, but dense with great ideas.
The 22nd annual Vellum furniture competition and exhibition featured 262 student produced entries from Cal Poly’s College of Architecture and Environmental Design, the most extensive Vellum thus far.
Before the event was called Vellum, there was Di Santo’s found object furniture project.
Every fall in his second year design class, Di Santo would take his students to Heilmann Salvage Company in Atascadero to pick out a piece of “junk.” The students would then return to the studio and work to create a piece of furniture from the scrap they collected.
In 2004, the owners of Vellum, a design and build company based out of San Luis Obispo, reached out to Di Santo with the intention of partnering to start a design competition.
That year, Di Santo’s found object furniture project became Vellum, and the company from which the event borrows its namesake became the competition’s titular sponsor.
The result of the partnership between Vellum and Di Santo, along with the College of Architecture and Environmental Design, was a massively popular event that continues to thrive 22 years later.
This year, students spent six weeks designing original pieces of furniture for a chance to win the top award: SPaCe Architecture Milano Grand Prize. The student who receives this award has the chance to attend the Salone International del Mobile, the largest furniture fair in the world, held in Milan, Italy.
Di Santo said the Salone International del Mobile is akin to the fanfare of fashion week, but instead of clothing and fashion shows, the massive turnout is for the furniture.
“All of Milan comes alive for Design Week,” Di Santo said. “All of the galleries are having something special going on. All the architects and intro designers and furniture designers from all over the world come and convene in Milan.”
This year, the SPaCe Architecture Milano Grand Prize, which refers to the names of the original principles: Stapleton, Pensi and Como according to Di Santo, was awarded to Grace Schwigert of Jackson Studio.
Students are typically judged by a panel of five judges according to Di Santo. The panel changes from year to year but usually follows a formula: one industry professional with some level of notoriety within the architecture world, a professor from the architecture department, a couple of state level architects and a local professional.
There were 23 opportunities to win awards at this year’s Vellum. Some awards bestow students with a scholarship like the ga+d Structural Invention Award while others like the M:oME Book Award and RNT Book Award grant students a signed book according to Di Santo.
After spending their fourth year either abroad or working off campus, architecture students spend their fifth year working on their thesis. Di Santo described a thesis as a chance for the student to figure out what is important to them architecturally and represent that critical take in their furniture.
The winner of one of the two M:oME Book awards, architecture senior Lauren Sottosanti of Osborn Studio, designed a multipurpose stool called “Handle With Care.”
For Sottosanti, her thesis revolved around the notion of “care.”
Sottosanti brought the ideas she was examining in her thesis into her piece for Vellum. To Sottosanti, care in architecture can take the form of making objects with care, so in turn, the consumers will hopefully care more about the pieces too.
Sottosanti’s thesis concept, 70 hours of work and found material like old pallets of wood merged to create a multi purpose stool that is meant to be interacted with by users. Using her own body as a mold, she fit the small stand to fit around her shoulders as if in an embrace.
“I wanted to have a piece that was very interactable, ” Sottosanti said. “You can hug it, and it’ll hug you back.”
Regardless if a student wins an award or not, Vellum is an opportunity for students to showcase their hard work, which in some cases was upwards of 50 hours from inception to completion.
Kenneth Wong of Osborn Studio, who won the EsserStudios Contemporary award for his lamp titled “Luma,” says he spent anywhere from 40 to 50 hours working on his lamp. Wong, an architecture senior, said the inspiration behind “Luma” came from an exploration of the themes in his thesis.
“With my thesis I’m exploring ideas of softness in architecture and how we can use that to design in our rigid environments,” Wong said. “I was thinking about ways that we can show the interaction between something solid and rigid and then something that is soft and flexible.”
The result of this exploration was a lamp made with the shell from an inflatable toy ball. Inspired by the stretchy material’s translucent quality, Wong decided to experiment with different wiring techniques to transform the toy into “Luma.”
The product is a futuristic-looking stelliform blob with 3-D printed silver caps on each of the points. Inside the lamp are three rods controlled by a friction pin which allow the user to readjust the membrane to form the lamp into different shapes.
“I was interested in softness and how it doesn’t really have a distinct form,” Wong said. “It can change depending on how the user kind of wants to define it. But also it changes in response to how people interact with it as well. I think that’s what I was going for with the material.”
Another student that experimented with alternative lighting was city and regional planning senior Joon Isobe. For Isobe, the spark that inspired his project “Lamp” was his background in the film industry where he works as a gaffer and key grip.
A key grip is the main grip in charge of all the other grips on a film set. Grips are in charge of all the tasks that encompass lighting on a set, like running cables or various production duties.
Both the bulb and the lamp shade elements are common materials found in film equipment. The shade material is a technical fabric called full soft frost that Isobe acquired from a Los Angeles rag house, a facility that sells fabrics for film.
“It’s a frost diffusion so it softens light, but it lets some specular peculiarities through,” Isobe said. “What I really like about full soft frost is that the source appears warmer, but the rest of the frame fills out a little bit cooler. It’s a very interesting diffusion material.”
The skeleton of the lamp shade is a gel frame, which is used in the film industry to hold diffusion color or a color gel in front of a light on a film set, according to Isobe. On the front of the frame is a tiny inked label, a cheeky nod to Isobe’s work as a key grip.
“You always label your frames which is why I have it right on the front,” he said.
`Each student’s piece of furniture has a sheet offering a short explanation of its functions and inspiration. On Isobe’s, he nicknamed himself “Lamp boy.”
“My entire life was consumed by this lamp for the past month and a half, so I just became the lamp boy,” he said.
This year, all 262 projects at Vellum were 100% pure, meaning every step of the process was done solely by the student, according to Di Santo. Processes like powder coating, upholstery and welding were done primarily in house at Cal Poly by students.
To Di Santo, one of the most rewarding parts of Vellum is seeing the differing strengths of his students materialize in the furniture as they work with a real budget and real materials. To him, this is the real “Learn by Doing” example.
“Most of our designs are 50,000 square foot, seven story projects that we’ll never realize in a million years as students,” Di Santo said. “This is one of the only times in academia where you can actually sit down and craft something that you conceived.”