Playful Portugese design collective, Dose, came up with a cunning plan to deal with the problem of restricted budget and space for a temporary bar at Porto’s annual academic festival. Debuting their ‘TUBE-IT system’, the team – António Martins, Carlos Foyedo and Luís Grilo – have gone delightfully lo-tech, strapping corrugated plastic tube to the pop-up bar’s tight 3m² frame with heavy-duty cable ties. You might think it’d look like the underneath of a particularly obsessive IT manager’s desk, or the site of a fibre optics dig, but step away from the construction and the materials take on a different appearance; it becomes almost organic and otherworldly looking. It’s like a hairy TARDIS for the 21st century. By night it adopts another guise again, and you begin to realise that Dose’s TUBE-IT system has real substance; cheap, quick, easily accessible and visually captivating… this clever Portugese trio may find themselves responsible for a significant global hike in the price of corrugated tubing.
Photography: DOSE + Carlos Trancoso
