Believe it or not, these are Ikea shelves
This Ikea hack will awaken the math nerd in you.
Japanese artist and architect Takayoshi Kitagawa has created dramatic parabolic shelves out of simple, modular Ikea shelving to decorate his childhood home.
He wanted to find a way to categorise his father's vast array of collected items, he says in a blog post.
Kitagawa got the idea to create parabolic shelving units off Ikea's customisable Kallax shelves, after draping duct tape from the ceiling, which drooped down in a U-shaped arc.
"I wanted to make a small apartment floor entirely visible," Kitagawa said in an email response to Mashable's queries. "I happened to have some packing tape for relocation so I did the study drawing with the extra tape."
The shelves are intended to create harmony in a fluid space where people, light and wind pass through so that the space is not dominated by the shelf, the Osaka-born architect says.
"The parabolic shelf hanging from the ceiling makes contact with the floor while gradually squeezing the light entering through the window," he wrote on his blog. "Shadows are created on the floor around the contact point, and the form is established structurally."
Kitagawa told us separately over email that the shelves' parabolic curves enabled them to have the structural strength to stand at one point.
"While [the] shelves separate the space, they do not partition the floor. The light, the wind, and human movement passes through the lower part of the void of the curved surface.
"It makes you [feel] that you are arranging things in the space just like [a] Japanese rock garden," he said.
The architect made three of the floor-to-ceiling parabolic shelves in different sizes, and placed them throughout the apartment.
You can read more about Kitagawa here.
[h/t Spoon & Tamago]
UPDATE: Feb. 23, 2017, 10:33 a.m. SGT Updated with Kitagawa's comments.
I am an intern with Mashable Asia, focusing on viral news, lifestyle news and feature news in the region.
