Kalos Eidos was a co-curator and participating designer in “24 x 24 x 24,” a temporary takeover of Storefront for Architecture in New York, in which 24 architects and designers were brought together to design 24 small seats to host a 24-hour-long marathon of events. Making the most of the longest day of the year, each designer shaped an hour of programming and contributed a custom designed seat for a collective gathering during the summer solstice. From dawn until dusk, the event offered an experiment of collaborative production in design, action, and thinking.

The prompt to each designer was to consider an act of thinking through design within a short window of time and very limited set of constraints. Can a design for a seat capture your ideas, concerns, or ambitions? As an exercise in collective focus, endurance, dedication, and play, the program was intended to be shaped by the basic constraints of time, context and duration rather than a theme. Rather than shape the event, we aimed for the event to shape itself. Each hour acquired its own form, setting in motion a chain of events that unfolded as a performative exquisite corpse.
 
We likened the experiment to a design equivalent of Dogme 95, assigning some very basic rules and minimal budget. In search of an antidote to over-polished, hyper-refined, hyperbolic and expensive design, we aimed to return to something more fundamental and essential, leaving behind the trappings of fashion and technological exuberance. 24 architects design a series of small seats that seek to reveal a closer relation between design and its use, between people and objects, between artifacts and place.