Reception Desk SL4000

Discipline : Student

Categories : Students work / Student - Industrial Design / Product / Furniture

Within the context of a Plastic Art class, the students at general art high school had one mission: design a re ception desk at their school.
This piece of furniture embodies the door hinge of Saint Luc high school in Liège. It is placed in the
study room”, which in the center of all the different building wings and with a direct access to the main stairway.
This study room plays numerous roles in our school: it is used to super vise the students when a teacher is absent or to let the young students eat their lunch when space is missing in our cafeteria. It’s also a place where students can ask for useful information to our supervisors, who are present permanently.
During parent-teacher conferences, this working space is turned into a reception office to guide the visitors towards the teachers divided into the different classrooms.
This desk has thus various functions: as an observation post at the study room, as a common working desk for all the supervisors, as a reception desk for the students looking for practical information or care but also, at times, as a reception desk for the parents.
One of our school’s best features is our annual art exhibition, when this ro om becomes a gigantic art gallery exposing most of our students’ art projects. For this event, all furniture is removed from the area.
Therefore, the desk had to be welcoming, functional, sustainable but also easily dismantled and transported.
For their intervention to be as accurate and sustainable as possible, the students had to consider all the regular users’ needs and understand the role of this place as the core of their school.
Then, in groups of three, twenty-one students of sixth grade had to work for twelve periods to design the seven prototypes on models and plans to scale. With the aim of defining a project which would perfectly meet the users’ needs and the constraints of the wood material, they presented it to our school’s directors and supervisors and to a carpenter of the Centre des métiers du patrimoine “La Paix-Dieu”.
During the following week, after a few necessary technical and practical changes, half of the class got the opportunity to build the selected project in the carpentr y workshop of the heritage trades center “La Paix Dieu”. They were lent proper material to shape wood and were given valuable technical advice by a reputed carpenter.
Except for the fixing screws and nails and the little stainless steel support tubes, the whole desk was made from wood. The arcs of a semicircle were crafted with the staggered joints sealing technique and assembled according to the mortise and tenon method. The trays were made of oak finish plywood panels, their edges and laths in oak wood too and the drawer units from white-painted MDF panels.
The recycling of the materials also received careful consideration. The paintings, varnishes and wooden panels were leftovers from former projects at the heritage trades center “La Paix Dieu”. The two stainless steel tubes allowing the main desk to rest on the second one came from a vacuum wand handle.
The sixth graders in the general section of art in Saint Luc Liège are proud to present you their creation, which wouldn’t exist without the generous support of our partners.

The project in images