As Koolhaas said, his goal was to create furniture "that performs in very precise but also in completely unpredictable ways, furniture that not only contributes to the interior but also to the animation of the interior." and indeed, flexibility is the key here. A massive, heavily engineered piece called the 04 Counter consists of three horizontal bars that stack like a wall, but which can also pivot and cantilever, a metamorphosis from a spatial partition to a communal gathering place, a “piazza,” as Benjamin Pardo, Knoll’s design director, called it, adding, “I wanted to talk about work and not the office - the distinction being that today people work everywhere. With that in mind, the OMA pieces are more kinetic than static: many are easily adjustable so that with changes in height, adjacency and degree of privacy, almost any space can be transformed to a place of work.”
The "Tools for Life" range is based on the idea that furniture should be understood as a high-performance instrument rather than a design statement.
The collection features tables that can be adjusted - also by electric motor - from coffee table to desk height, swivel chairs, a stool, an executive desk, and other items. Each piece is made from a simple material palette (transparent acrylic, leather, travertine, steel, wood, glass, concrete) making the furniture compatible with a range of residential and workplace interiors.
OMA collaborated with Inside/Outside on the design of Knoll exhibition space at the Salone del Mobile. The project, featuring an organic sequence of spaces, defined by a continuous double layer white curtain, redefines the paradigm of a trade show stand, provoking a more subtle, surprising and intimate relationship with the products.
CREDITS
Rem Koolhaas ; Partner, OMA
Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli ; Associate, OMA
Benjamin Pardo ; Executive Vice President, Design Director, Knoll
Khalid Masoud ; Lead Product Design Engineer, Knoll
Rem Koolhaas on 04 Counter.
“Tools for Life” is an 11-piece collection of furniture designed by Rem Koolhaas and his studio, OMA. Overall, it’s a frank and, at times, frisky expression of the idea that furniture is, ultimately, equipment for living and so has an obligation to perform at a high level.
Today people work everywhere—not just in an office—and the message here is that pieces that are easily adaptable are more likely to remain relevant. Many of these pieces move up or down or laterally, taking different, sometimes unpredictable positions or even shapes, according to what users need. Architect, author, curator, professor, self-made sociologist, and full-time provocateur, Koolhaas has produced a wide range of projects, though it’s the large, such as the Rothschild Bank in London, the extra large, such as the CCTV tower in Beijing, or the super-sized, such as a master plan for a city of 200,000 people in Doha, that have dominated his office in recent years. For this, his fi rst official foray into product design, Koolhaas had to rethink his own preconceptions about practicing at such a small scale. Tapped by Knoll to help mark its 75th anniversary, he joins an august group of architects who have shaped the company’s history, including Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Eero Saarinen, Robert Venturi and Frank Gehry. Below is a condensed and edited series of interviews outlining the principles behind “Tools for Life.”
WHY DID KNOLL WANT TO WORK WITH OMA?
BP.- Because of the way Rem Koolhaas thinks about architecture. In general, I’m drawn to his thinking—not always to exactly what it is that he’s saying, but to the frankness with which he says it and his ability to dismiss extraneous stuff. And we wanted to see a contemporary fi gure interpret Modernist ideas. Some of the pieces are, in their static state, very much like Florence Knoll pieces: They are the background pieces that create sub-architecture in an architectural space. Yet there’s a kinesthetic quality to this collection—many of the pieces adjust, move, or transform. Certain pieces undergo a metamorphosis. It’s the first time since the Frank Gehry collection where we’ve done something that says: “Here’s an architect of today who is challenging us to think about furniture and ideas related to both business and domestic environments.” And it’s not just about wonderful objects but also about how people interact with space and architecture. It’s a collection of products that really pushes how it is that we are working, thinking, and living. What does it really mean to be able to sit on the floor with people and have a meeting and then, an hour later, use that same table at a full standing height for something entirely different?
WHY FURNITURE? WHY NOW?
RK.- I had always felt that designing furniture was kind of redundant. But due to some experiences in my private life, at home, I was designing at that scale. I had thought that it would be almost impossible, but actually I enjoyed it. It unlocked energy. So I decided that our so-called principle of not being involved in design needed to be thrown overboard.
IP.- It was an interesting brief: To design furniture for something that is in between an office and a domestic environment—a hybrid or fl uid environment. So the pieces themselves are hybrids and have multiple uses. Our interest was more in how the furniture could perform—what the pieces could do for users—and not what the pieces look like.
Rem Koolhaas, center, examines the 05 Round Table with Benjamin Pardo, right.
HOW DOES THE FURNITURE COLLECTION RELATE TO OMA’S ARCHITECTURE?
RK.- The pieces all perform different tasks. The furniture is, in a way, mutable and changeable and so for that reason it corresponds very closely to my interest in things that perform rather than things that have particular shapes. So in that sense there is a kind of seamless incorporation of the same logic, but at a totally different scale.
IP.- There’s a common attitude—one that’s related to function more than design.
HOW DID THE COLLECTION DEVELOP?
BP.- From the start, what was important to me in terms of talking to Rem about this project was that I wanted to be able to talk about office space planning concepts in the most neutral possible fashion and to tie them back to residential ideas as well. In the initial discussions, I was trying to avoid any kind of aesthetic imposition or any question of geometry or any kind of infl uential materiality. Strangely enough though, that neutrality is very much part of what the furniture has actually become. So, the real conversation at the start was about height, adjacency, and visual division. I said that I wanted to focus on work, not the offi ce. And the distinction is that people work everywhere. And one of the reasons why height, boundary, and spatial relationships are so important is because you fi nd yourself working in very different kinds of circumstances. So, what was critical in terms of the overall concept is being able to work in any position from sitting on the fl oor to standing up, and that requires height adjustments of tables more than anything else. The next question was really one associated with partitioning: how can we have some kind of architectural form that physically divides space? So, we talked through all of those different kinds of abstract ideas that might apply equally to the offi ce as to the home.
RK.- Knoll presented a series of interconnected typologies they wanted us to do and those turned out to be in themselves very, very interesting almost to the point that we decided to translate the typologies into a kind of apparatus—to be very literal about them. We thought we ought to make the pieces perform but we ought not to mask them in terms of adding “design.”
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