It can often feel like there are few places left in modern day life that don't orientate around looking at a screen. We habitually wake in a sleepy haze, reaching out from under the duvet and letting its electroluminescence jolt us back to reality. The morning commute is a blur of glowing rectangles and what once might have been a curious wander down the high street to browse the shops has become a sedentary series of taps and deliveries.
So, there is something faintly exhausting about the promise of a new trend in technology. Another device launched, another screen, engineered to fit even more neatly into our already digitally dominated lives. This week, Apple unveiled the iPhone Duo, its first foldable iPhone, which opens to reveal a 7.6-inch display and then folds back into a pocket-sized shape.
Apple seems keen to shout about the device's ‘breakthrough foldable design’ – but there is nothing particularly new about the fold. In fact, it is one of design's oldest tricks. Long before the precision hinge was being sold to us as the best thing in consumer technology since smart glasses and robot vacuum cleaners, designers were using it to make furniture more useful, architecture more fluid and rooms more adaptable.
Folding design helped divide rooms, transform the architectural structure of the house or even double the size of a table for extra guests at dinner. Perhaps, that is the most interesting thing about the fold. It has always about making space, for another person, another purpose, and another, better way of living.
Few objects encapsulate this better than the folding screen. The House & Garden archive has long celebrated its decorative possibilities, from its origins in China and Japan to its adoption in European interiors. A screen can provide a functional element of privacy within a room without the permanent obstruction of a wall. It can conceal elements of the house and can offer another plane of colour, pattern or texture.
From historic to modern interpretations, the folding screen is the perfect illustration of how the fold can be both practical and decorative.
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Charles and Ray Eames took this design of the folding screen and made it refreshingly modern with their Folding screen FSW designed in 1946. Made from plywood panels joined by flexible hinges, the repeated panels and their curved surfaces give the object a rhythm. It evidences an elegant example of an idea that runs through much of good design – that the mechanism itself is central to the ornament.
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Giancarlo Pierettis Plia chair, is perhaps one of the most satisfying examples. Designed in the late 1960s, the transparent plastic and tubular steel was built around Piretti's ingenious three-disc pivot, allowing the seat, back and legs to fold in a sleek thin form. The chair entered production in 1969 and became an icon of Italian industrial design.
It's brilliance is both functional visual, the hinge becoming the focal point of the design. Yet, the plia chair's ability to be folded, hung against a wall or stacked makes it an example of practical perfection.
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The PP512 folding chair, designed by Hans J. Wegner, is a more tactile and traditionally crafted interpretation, with a similar mechanical function. Wegner was fascinated by the history of the folding chiar and the relationship between furniture and movement. The result was a chair which feels less stark and industrial.
The PP512 chair exhibits an interesting interpretation of folding furniture, an object often associated with compromise, or a piece we would usually prefer to keep hidden away: an extra chair brought out for an unexpected guest, an awkward camping chair or flimsy collapsable garden table. But Wegner's design counters this conception, demonstrating that design can be both practical and beautiful.
The history of domestic furniture is abundant with fold-adjacent solutions. The drop-leaf table, for example, is the master of the this. It can be raised when dinner is served, dropped when not and provides the opportunity to host a variable number of guests around the same table. An idea which feels surprisingly contemporary, in modern-day design speak it could be labeled as flexible living or space-saving design.
Perhaps the most powerful fold of all: architectural. Folding doors, concertina walls, shutters and opening windows allow a house to change its relationship with the outside world. A wall can become a doorway, a series of windows can be folded back to provide a new structural augmentation within a house. A room can be divided for privacy in the winter and opened towards the garden in summer.
A conventional door offers you a decision: open or closed. A folding wall gives you different degrees of openness enabling architecture to become something that can be adjusted according the day.
It appears that, in both technology and interior design, designers continue to return to the fold because it offers the opportunity for something to be more than one thing. The folding screen can be a wall or a piece of furniture in its own right; a folding door can provide a boundary but also bring openness. Now, of course, it can be a pocket-sized phone and a much larger screen. The fold really is at the heart of adaptable design.
