A consistent star in the premier league of European designers, Patrick Jouin in enjoying an ultimate accolade--a show of his own at the Pompidou Center in Paris. On display are his impressive eclecticism and brilliantly innovative mastery of many genres of design. This stool, or tabouret, folds and unfolds like an umbrella. But the most intriguing thing about it is how it was made--a process of rapid heat prototyping that remains a mystery to me, except to stumblingly suggest that lasers are beamed into a container holding a volume of powder, heating and solidifying the powder in minute correspondence to a 3-D computer design. Moving joints can even be created by this process. When done, rather like excavating some ancient relic from the earth, you chip and brush away the excess powder and what is left is this remarkable, and remarkably made, object.
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