Other peoples chairs, other peoples ideas

I came across this beautiful chair "idea" on the blog Grijs. It is a piece from a larger project by two Swiss designers- kueng-caputo who explore the nature of the design copy and if you can make a piece from the original idea. Its very interesting since I am teaching furniture design and my method is to tell the student to go look at a particular design and see how its formed or put together or conceived. This is not plagiarism, this is looking at who and what you are derived from as a young designer. I would the say that this Copy project falls short only because the "copies" are more often than not better than the design icon they are paying homage to.