Selling Your Stuff: Are You Ready to Go Public with Your Industrial Designs?(Practice‪)‬

Some years ago, Christopher Bardt and Kyna Leski, architecture professors at the Rhode Island School of Design and the founders of 3SIX0 in Providence, R.I., had a student whose thesis project was designing a house in Thailand for her parents. When the $5-million house was constructed, the parents invited Bardt and Leski to design the furnishings. The architects did, and enjoyed the process so much they decided to give the one-of-a-kind pieces another life. After making prototypes, they put photos of their work on their Web site (www.3six0.com) and began shopping it around. "Making one thing over a long period of time is a little arcane," Bardt says of doing architecture. "It's a consumer society, and it's exciting to see something reproduced in dazzling amounts." Architects, by nature, are an exacting breed, looking to impose their sense of order as far down the design hierarchy as they can. Rather than confining their art to a house's fixed forms, most architects welcome the opportunity to design objects that can be sat upon, eaten at, and slept on. But while it's common to create furniture, glasswork, and metalwork for particular clients, some architects are exploring less-charted territory: selling their industrial designs to the public.