An Interview with Van Bo Le-Mentzel: “Help the Helpful!”
Where will we put the ten square foot house? It doesn’t matter since it’s mobile! (Photo: Van Bo Le-Mentzel)
25 May 2013
Van Bo Le-Mentzel wants to make the world a little better. He therefore invents things like do-it-yourself furniture, Karma Chakhs and crowducing. In our interview he talks about what Bauhaus reveals about the German soul and how to build an inexpensive home with ten square feet of living space.
Mr Le-Mentzel, you build what are perhaps the world’s smallest houses. What’s the story behind them?
Le-Mentzel: I come from a refugee family, where you often ask yourself what home is. Or what the good life is. Is it defined by a big house with a car, a front yard and a dog? I quickly realized that my image of a perfect life was pushed on me from the outside. It is practically drummed into us that we must work as long and hard as possible, take a mortgage on and then retire to our house in the suburbs. These dreams of a perfect retirement have a great deal to do with money. I asked myself whether going into debt is the only way to get a house and am trying to crack this nut with the 10-square-foot house. Using only 250 euros worth of materials, anyone can build their own house. You don’t need property because it’s small and has wheels, so you can put it in a park or a front garden. If anyone complains, you just roll it a few metres further.
What is it all about for you?
That not I as the designer decide what is done with the house, but that the builder of the house defines its purpose. This is a way of thinking that they don’t teach at school – to create spaces that are finished by the user. At a design academy or architectural faculty, students are taught to design perfect hotels, schools and cities, which are later merely consumed. That is changing now: consumers are no longer pure funders, but have the accountability to take part in the process of design.
You just held a workshop in Dublin. What exactly did you do there?
It was a workshop with students at the National College of Art and Design, the Ballymun Rediscovery Centre and the Goethe-Institut Dublin. In the workshop, the students built their own 10-square-foot houses. I provided the plans and everyone was able to decide for themselves what purpose their house would have, how it could make the world a little better. Interesting houses were created. For example, a couple of students built a confessional, probably the first secular confessional box ever, where every student would be able to talk about their problems. Others took water as their theme with their Van Boat.
Photo gallery from the workshop: The “10-square-foot house” in Dublin
You were now in Dublin, in September 2012 in Montréal: you seem to get around quite a lot. Are the affordability and design of living spaces, sustainability and social justice global topics?
Definitely. The causes of our problems are also of a global nature. Due to industrialization and globalization western nations have shifted production overseas where it costs less. Now, these low wage countries also strive for the prosperity that we enjoy. So they are outsourcing labour as well. The result is that at some point there will be no one willing to work for dumping wages. In general we could say that my ideas are more interesting for countries where there are no shortages. In affluent societies like ours everything that we want to have, we can order overnight. In other countries doing it yourself is the norm. In Egypt for example there are no building centres. So if someone in Egypt wants to build a do-it-yourself chair they have to search for screws and wood. This, in turn, creates a community. We could learn a great deal from this solidarity.
The Picture Hut, through the roof of which Dubliners can take a look at their city, in action
Your assessment: why is it that your work has gone viral? “Build more – buy less” got more than 11,000 likes on Facebook.
In retrospect, I guess you could say that my ideas are popular because of the many Facebook likes and the press response. All I wanted to do was go to night school and learn to build a chair to impress my wife. The fact that this led to a movement is great, naturally. But it was never the intention or aim. What we are lacking in our western thinking are open-ended results. The movement is not an institution, not a foundation, not an organization, but merely an idea that is entirely open-ended. It can lead to a workshop or a book. Now we’re making a shoe. Maybe one day we’ll open a hospital.
Van Bo Le-Mentzel: “A movement was never the aim” (Photo: Luke Abiol © 2012 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York)
It’s easy: Help the helpful!
How did you get interested in Bauhaus?
Firstly because it was the first to give me an answer to the question of what is the German identity. As someone newly arrived in Germany it was important for me to know what kind of country this is. Can you be proud to live here? How does it feel to be German? No one would answer that question; no politician, no teacher, not my friends, not my parents. But Bauhaus did by showing me: this is what a German chair looks like, these are German details. This is how to build appropriate to the material and sustainably. These are all very German ideas. Bauhaus ultimately is about fairness: everyone should have the opportunity to live a good life, to practice their faith, to express their thoughts freely. I can find all of that in a chair. And that is exactly the second reason: Bauhaus, like the Volkshochschule, is an institution that attempts to make the good life accessible to all.
On Facebook, the crowd was allowed to decide what would happen to the profits from the book. What’s your next project?
The crowd on Facebook voted that fifty percent of the money would go towards my starting a family and fifty percent would be invested in new projects. Right now I am working on the production of Karma Chakhs. This is open source shoe production. I call it crowducing, or when the crowd begins to produce. There are already crowdfunding and crowdsourcing. Crowducing is the next step in which a group of interested people begin to produce.
What is the next furniture you plan?
My wife and I invented a box that can be attached to the 24-euro chair. The chair is mounted on runners so that it rocks. A baby can be laid in the box and this makes the chair a cradle.
Elisa Stahmleder held the interview.
Van Bo Le-Mentzel, 36, is actually an architect, but became known with his invention of do-it-yourself furniture. To impress his wife, in 2010 he attended a woodworking course at a Volkshochschule (adult education centre). When he noticed how simple it is to make handsome and yet inexpensive furniture yourself, he shared his knowledge on the Internet. Build more – buy less was born. The idea behind it is that anyone, even if they have little money, can live well. The do-it-yourself furniture was followed by diverse projects such as the 10-square-foot house and Karma Chakhs, which aim for sustainability and social justice. Today, Le-Mentzel can be seen on a variety of television shows and in newspapers and holds workshops around the world.
