Oslo-based furniture designer Bjørn Jørund Blikstad may have spent his childhood playing too much Tetris, the Russian video game where players have to arrange the four-sided pieces called Tetrominoes so that they compose a horizontal line of blocks without leaving gaps. Actually, Blikstad is probably too young to have developed a fascination with the puzzle game–unless he is one of those interesting persons who enjoys archaic activities (a man who shaves with a straight razor, uses a rotary telephone, or writes on a typewriter).

3D Bookshelf. Designed by Bjørn Jørund Blikstad for Imeüble.

As it happens here at 3rings, the cube shape has been recurring lately: see Volume.MGX and DDD rugs. There must be something in the air–designers who fondly remember their period tables or Charms hard candies. If you’re looking for square inspiration, the regular quadrilaterals are everywhere.

Their appearance is not the least bit impressive in a 3D Bookshelf by Imeüble, the Norwegian design firm founded by Bjørn Jørund Blikstad. A recent graduate from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Blikstad has “been working with the concept of storage by looking at it, not as a practical issue involving the storage of known objects, but in sync with our memory; comparing the mental storage capacity with the actual.” In other words, he’s been surrounding himself with little cubes of varying sizes, attempting to organize and compartmentalize things–both tangible and intangible. What Blikstad has come up with so far is a storage unit that gives volume to the square, blowing the shape into a 3-Dimensional object that can hold objects inside. The resulting 3D wall shelving is composed of diamond-shaped pieces (like harlequins), three of which form a cubed square. Scatter them against a wall in bold color combinations and you can achieve a play with depth that borders on the vertiginous.

Imeüble’s 3D Bookshelf holds a little of everything–an excellent idea for book-lovers in particular, since most bibliophiles also enjoy related memorabilia: simple items such as pens and pencils, bookmarks and paper clips; to more genre-specific things like Star Trek figurines and fairy tale illustration art. With Blikstad’s creation, people can arrange their libraries in little, manageable segments, adding or subtracting cubes as the collection fluctuates.