NY MoMA gets Trashed

The Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Architecture and Design is including the award-winning GARBINO trash can, designed by Karim Rashid and produced by Umbra, in its permanent collection in New York.

Umbra debuted the Garbino Trash Can in 1996, along with the larger Garbo Can and the smaller Garbini Can. This was the first family of products designed for Umbra by Karim Rashid. Known for its swerving rim, flowing curves and negative spaces, the Garbino brought glamour to trash cans. The Garbino, with a 10-quart capacity, remains a key part of Umbra's line; it is a core product that each year introduces Umbra's newest colors.

"Karim Rashid’s Garbino trash can is wildly successful because it’s an almost perfect design… It’s highly functional -- it has handles built in and is shaped so that trash goes in and out easily. But the first thing most people notice about the Garbino is that it looks and feels great," commented Virginia Postrel, author of The Substance of Style: How the Growth of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, in an interview with BoxesandArrows.com.

"When Paul Rowan first asked me to study wastebaskets in 1994," Karim Rashid recalls, "the ubiquitous plastic wastebasket on the market was a rectangular black can with absolutely no character, and there was little alternative. I thought that banal objects need life, they need presence, but they also need to make awful tasks more pleasant."