Published by Martha Danly under Inside Design, Sustainable Products

There’s a lot of green fog around—people claiming their products or actions are green, with the thinnest possible justification in terms of the real green movement.

But what objects are truly green by design? What are their essential qualities?

When I’m on the hunt, I’m looking for something that is green from top to bottom: something that the designer has created for life, honoring the triple bottom line of economic, ecological, and ethical good. It’s made of renewable, organic, or salvaged materials. When that happens it’s always inspiring and fun to share. We’re in luck today, because we can find this essential combination in a furniture collection and the man behind it, Facundo Poj.

Even his name tells a story: Facundo (fah-KOON-do) means ‘fertile’ and Poj is the Argentinian equivalent of an Ellis Island truncation of his great grandfather’s Russian name. To pronounce it, the closest we can get in English is actually via Gaelic, rhyming with ‘Loch’, as in Loch Ness.

Facundo’s handcrafted furniture is collected by private and corporate clients, such as Veuve Clicquot, Citrine by the Stones, and Ecoist. These days he’s an inhabitant of Miami, by way of Boston and his native Bueno Aires. Trained as a master builder in Argentina, Facundo then earned degrees in Architecture and Urban Affairs in Boston, where he engaged in restoring old buildings such as the research labs at Harvard Medical School. In the process it struck him how much was thrown away during renovation. That inspired him to create new, useful objects from salvaged materials.

He started with drawings of chairs, then began making chaise longues, armchairs, ottomans, coffee tables, and a bar. Working with throw-aways such as bathtubs, airplane parts, and industrial tanks, Facundo sees beyond the literal saving of an object and the broader protection of the environment. “We really need to save ourselves,” he says. “Humans have only been around for 250,000 years, just a few seconds of a 24-hour day in geological time. The environment will fix itself without us. It’s really us that needs to be saved.”

This reminds him of George Carlin’s famous environmental satire in 1992, when he said, “The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.” Whom, or what, are we really saving?

Recalling how much his forebears valued the few objects they brought from Russia, Facundo designs objects for life. Rather than treat a sofa as something that will eventually become obsolete and disposable, he wants us to choose very carefully, to keep the object for life, with the possibility that our children may inherit it someday.

In refabricating each object, he also thinks about the memory it contains. The window of a Boeing 747 that flew 11,000 flights before it was decommissioned makes him think, “11,000 people looked through that window. I’m recycling the biography of the object and theirs, too. Sometimes I wonder how many people bathed in that bathtub. These are memories of people, important life stories to be saved.”

Facundo aims for his furniture to evolve past the physicality of the object and to be a work of art. “A sofa is so big, it better be beautiful—it better connect with you at a biological level. And because you see it every day, why not make it a work of art?” And whether or not you can afford one of his pieces, there is pleasure in simply seeing them, just as we love looking at objects at Cooper-Hewitt or MoMA.

You won’t be surprised to hear that Facundo cites Renzo Piano and Carlo Mollino as important design influences. His modernist roots connect closely to those of Alvar Aalto and Charles and Ray Eames, plus the International Style of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus of Breuer.

Underlying each of Facundo’s pieces is a drawing, the core of his thought process. He sketches every day, making each drawing one continuous serpentine line, thus producing organic, biological forms. He feels that the continuous line gives him freedom to create shapes shared in our collective unconscious. He loves snakes, a universal figure in cultural mythology—focusing on the gravitational pull toward the snake, then resting the human body on it. Whether or not that abstraction works for you, your eyes can delight in the results of his creative process.

Facundo recently discovered and began fabricating with Smith and Fong PlybooPure brand of plywood bamboo, an ideal material that can be reshaped to fit the form of the human body. “It’s infinite—I can solve any design with one line,” he says. “I can solve every need for the household, sometimes even two at once.  Take, for example, my seat that serves as a wine rack, too.”

I leave you to enjoy Facundo’s pieces and to consider how a simple sketch contains all you need to know about what it can become. Consider this original drawing presented by Renzo Piano to the architect selection committee for the newly-opened California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, the world’s greenest museum. It’s all there in the momentary sketch of a true designer extraordinaire.