Orgatec preview
As the biennial furniture behemoth Orgatec rolls around again, Mark Eltringham previews the likely themes that will dominate the show this year. In the November/December issue of Blueprint he’ll return with a review to tell us if his predictions were right and report on what excited and pushed the boundaries this year. Orgatec 2016, 25–29 Oct, Cologne
Words Mark Eltringham
The idea that an office design show should occupy a series of bright-lit, arid halls seems quaint in these days when so many have followed Milan’s lead and literally occupied the streets of a major city. But then the Germans have always held the city-centre Messe to their hearts in a way that might baffle the average Brit, reluctantly hauling themselves over to Earl’s Court or Olympia or - God forbid - ExCeL.
And so Cologne in the autumn of an even numbered year can only mean it’s time once again for Orgatec, the grosse dame of the world’s office-design trade shows. To be sure, it’s not quite as gross as it used to be, but its biennial appearance has a long-standing tradition of putting down a marker for the current state of thinking about office design.
Office furniture companies, in particular, are acutely sensitive to market trends, because they operate in such a rapidly changing and competitive market. So you can bet whatever their clients are talking about will be what they’re talking about and - ideally - actually doing something about.
Famiglia from Allermuir
This year we can expect a lot of talk about settings. For Orgatec this means branding the event as being about ‘New Visions of Work’. In practice this is about the blending of the office with all of the other places we now work, and manifesting itself most obviously in a shift of focus away from desks and chairs. Inexplicably the organisers have chosen to mark this fusion of spaces by splitting the show into four distinct segments - Office, Contract, Mobile and Space. Of these, only the Mobile section seems to have a clear identity, with a focus on technology rather than interior elements.
The cross-pollination of ideas from different types of spaces has been ongoing for some time now, but appears to be reaching some sort of tipping point in which it is impossible to distinguish between the presentation of an office, a hotel, a cafe, an airport lobby or a lounge.
Drum by Mac Stopa for Cappellini
The development that has most driven us to the brink of this tipping point of intersectional design is the co-working phenomenon, itself the outcome of a perfect storm in which digital start-ups don’t want a corporate office but are unable to commit to and afford the sorts of spaces available to them in the cities where they need to be. The aesthetics and flexible terms of these spaces are now influencing the mainstream office, and the sector’s key firms, especially WeWork, are becoming major players in commercial property markets in the world’s biggest cities.
This intersection of different types of space provides fertile territory for the likes of Vitra, which has always straddled different markets. The firm’s new sofa system designed by Jasper Morrison provides a perfect example of intersectional contract design, a world that appears to have given up in large part on rigid ergonomics in favour of comfort, style, mobility and flexibility... except for the fact that somewhere in the back of offices we can often still find serried rows of desks and chairs, once the stars of the show and now kept locked away like a little secret.
Fern task chair from Haworth
Office furniture companies still make such products in large numbers, but are trying in particular to reshape the market, especially with a new generation of sit-stand desks and task chairs that move with the user rather than relying on an array of adjustments.
The former trend is betrayed by the inclusion of a major display by Linak, which manufactures the mechanisms that make work surfaces and hospital beds rise and fall, the latter by the imminent launch of Buzzispace’s first task chair. Buzzispace has been, arguably, the most interesting player in the market for some years, first reshaping the debate about office acoustics before diverting into exactly the sort of intersectional design that defines the current market. The launch of the chair may not make the sort of splash that the Aeron did when it debuted at Orgatec in 1994, which may be a sign of changing times, but then again what could?
