Why flat-pack furniture?

Flat-pack has a reputation problem. For many people the word conjures a Sunday afternoon, an Allen key, and a bookcase that is slightly rhomboid when it should be rectangular. This is flat-pack done badly. It is not flat-pack as a design principle.

The first distinction worth making is between furniture designed to be flat and furniture merely disassembled to be flat. Almost anything can be taken apart and laid flat — that is not a design achievement, it is just dismantling. Designing something from the beginning to pack flat, assemble cleanly, and perform well in use is a different problem entirely.

One consequence of designing for assembly is that each component can be optimised independently. A shelf made as a single unit forces the plank and the bracket to be the same material — which means one of them is probably a compromise. When they are separate components, each can be exactly what it needs to be.

There is also something to be said for the joint itself. Carlo Scarpa, the Venetian architect, treated connections between materials as opportunities rather than necessities — places where the design could be most itself, most considered. A system designed for assembly is a system full of joints. Done well, those joints are not embarrassments to be hidden. They are, in Scarpa's sense, where the thinking shows.

Designing for assembly also implies designing for disassembly — which means no glues, no mixed-material bonds, no joints that can't be undone. This matters for repair. Any system that can be assembled by its owner can also be repaired by its owner. It matters at end of life too. Components that separate cleanly are components that can be recycled cleanly.

Then there is the effort question. Moving furniture into position requires carrying it and assembling it. Carrying a large preassembled object is a problem that yields only to more people or a larger door. Assembly is an engineering problem, and engineering problems respond to cleverness. With sufficient design attention, assembly effort approaches zero. Optimising the carrying of a large object would require redesigning the human being. This has not yet been attempted.

Flat-pack done well is not a compromise. It is, on balance, the more considered approach.