Since I live in Colorado, I’m perhaps overly familiar with ski lifts of all sizes and shapes. Around the mountains, abandoned and retired lift chairs and gondolas appear in backyards, storefronts, and hotel lobbies, where they serve as everything from benches to bus stops. That is not the only downhill skiing paraphernalia that gets repurposed: classic skis become residential fences and forsaken snowboards turn into restaurant booths. This is a great repurposing, since otherwise this old equipment would fill up landfills (and they do: landfills in the mountains are rife with plastic ski boots and broken bindings).

Rock. Designed by Adrien Rovero.

Swiss Project Repurposes Decommissioned Ski Gondolas

The Swiss are getting in on this winter sport recycling with a design program called Mountain Climbers: Revisiting a Swiss Icon, where 40 artists and architects were invited to reinvent decommissioned cable cars. The resulting objects will be auctioned off, with proceeds benefiting the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Switzerland. Adrien Rovero has turned his raw material into an outdoor rocking chair called Rock.

In thinking about the gondola, Rovero focused on its rocking movement, which for him was the pivotal and emblematic force of the object. He sought to recreate the back and forth balancing act of the ski lift by turning it into a rocking chair. Designed for exterior use, Rock also offers a place to sit in the garden. Among other locations, Rovero’s repurposed cable car will be exhibited in 2014 at Art Basel/Design Miami. If you’ve ever found yourself on a stopped gondola swinging in mid-air, then you’ll recognize the genius behind Rovero’s design, which rests on the more dynamic sensory experiences of proprioception, equilibrioception, and kinesthesioception. Rock is truly a moving project.

Via Moco Loco.

About the Designer: Adrien Rovero is a Swiss interior and industrial designer who graduated in 2006 from the Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne (ECAL), where he now teaches. His designs include lighting, furniture, bicycle racks, and conceptual pieces—all based “on a precise observation of elementary needs, where everything is excuse for speculations, with hypotheses and imagination.” His work is exhibited in museum collections worldwide, including at the Musée National d’Art Moderne/Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.