A room divider can satisfy many different purposes, including to create private meeting spaces, changing rooms, interior decoration pieces, or to block out the sun. However, most room dividers are door-like, rigid, and made from inefficient material.
Designers Stephanie Forsythe and Todd MacAllen at Molo studio have developed what may be the world’s most flexible room partition, calling it textile softwall or folding partition. Molo’s softwall can fold, bend, expand and contract, allowing it to be shaped into countless curved or linear formations. Each partition expands up to 15 feet (4.5 meters) long when fully extended but shrinks to the thickness of a book when stored compressed.
Molo’s textile softwalls are incredibly lightweight and come in a range of colors, as well as three different height choices – 8ft, 6ft, 5ft, or 3ft. The colors include ochre brown – which brings a warm earthy feeling, bright indigo – which were “dyed to create rhythms of radiant blues and inky, dark shadows,” and saturated black – which acquired its darkness from bamboo charcoal ink dyes.
Each softwall is made of 220 layers of paper or other flexible paper-like materials – certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. Those layers are then coated with a non-toxic fire retardant and laminated into a honeycomb structure that gives the softwall flexibility to bend and create shapes. As a bonus, the structure’s intricately layered barriers absorb sound.
The softwall’s magnetic ends have steel strips to latch onto hard surfaces easily, and a felt handle allows users to expand and contract the partition like a sliding door. These magnetic ends enable users to attach additional softwalls to each other to double or triple the size. The more softwalls linked together, the more curves and spaces users can create, and the longer it will be.
Molo’s folding partition can be arranged as a room divider, an acoustic partition to create privacy between spaces, or a dramatic backdrop for a performance, a speech, or an event.
