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The biennial office furniture fair returns with a focus this time on co-working and even an office in a driverless car, finds Mark Eltringham

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25 - 29 October
Review by: Mark Eltringham

All those old deskheads from the office furniture industry will tell you that Orgatec isn’t what it was. There is truth in this but primarily only in terms of scale. The organisers insist that visitor numbers continue to rise - up to 56,000 this year apparently, but trade fair numbers are always about as reliable as Soviet-era factory output reports, so you’re better off going by how people feel about the show. On that score it remains what it always was: a vast, disorientating moebius strip of halls lined with more furniture and office products than an industry neophyte could ever imagine existed. It has no truck with the city-wide socialising associated with design festivals in London, Milan and elsewhere.

It is an old-school, airless, overlit immersion in an industry. This remains both its strength and weakness. Orgatec is difficult to digest, wearing, outdated and an inevitable curate’s egg. Yet, because it is staged every two years in Cologne, it continues to offer an insight into the changing shape and function of the office that might not be evident with an annual update. And, because we also know that furniture designers operate in an absurdly competitive industry, whatever they are talking about reflects what they are being asked for by customers.

Allermuir

This can backfire somewhat when exhibitors latch on to a specific issue. This time, yet again, over 90 per cent had tagged their products as ‘acoustic solutions’, now one of the major go-to labels to apply to any product along with collaboration, wellbeing and productivity. The industry’s herd like instinct can ultimately render such issues meaningless. This year’s must-see stand without question was Vitra’s. It always makes a splash, but often in the past the focus has been on showcasing classics. That’s understandable, given the world’s ongoing love affair with mid-20th-century design, but it can slightly obscure the firm’s progressive instincts, which are usually timely and right.

Buzzispace

This year its stand was themed ‘Work’, which may seem obvious but isn’t always in the new era. What work now means is co-work which was reflected in the industrialised products on show and was in itself a continuation of Vitra’s approach at the last Orgatec, dominated by Jean Prouvé and the Bouroullecs. So here, alongside the more corporate height-adjustable desks and task chairs of Antonio Citterio and Alberto Meda, we had chipboard desk pods, screens that were lowered by a factory hoist, modular shelving and mesh panels. Some might interpret this as a manifestation of some abstracted idea of the office of the future, but it isn’t. The co-working phenomenon and its associated aesthetic is no longer limited to impoverished tech start-ups in East London, but has crossed into the mainstream as firms realise that if they want people to come to the office rather than go to Starbucks, they need fewer signs of corporate life and better coffee.

Vitra

As well as an industrialised aesthetic, co-working is also driving an interest in shared, playful design. This was perhaps most evident in the case of Buzzispace, the most fascinating firm to enter the market in recent years. Buzzispace redefined the idea of office acoustics when it emerged, but as this issue has been rendered increasingly meaningless by lazy thinking and bandwagoning, it has moved its focus elsewhere. This time its standout display was a crosspollination of the industrialised, modular and playful design themes from the show: a fluorescent yellow, modular climbing frame with inbuilt seats and benches, called BuzziJungle by Belgian designer Jonas Van Put.

HAG Sofi Mesh interior

This was offset to some extent by the muted colours and textures of the fabrics and leather on other products, in turn apparently a product of the growing trend for furniture companies to follow the lead of colour forecasters. This low-key approach provided an interesting juxtaposition. It was adopted by such luminaries as Walter Knoll, which presented its classically elegant designs in similarly muted finishes. The new ranges included a Foster + Partners sofa and a height-adjustable conference table by EDOS. It was an approach also favoured by a lesser-known firm called Cascando, which showcased a number of elegant products that reflected the hybrid nature of modern office design, which often has more in common with hotel, home and reception design than the traditional workplace. Its stylish products and autumnal finishes were incongruously themed ‘The Office is Your Playground’, but it was on point with its ideas. None of this is to suggest that the traditional office is dead. We can reject that idea out of hand.

Cascando

What is clear is that there has been a shift in focus away from desking towards seating for the past two decades. This presents an interesting challenge for designers because people’s backs and backsides haven’t changed over that time-frame so what makes us comfortable is broadly the same, even if the tech we use and so the way we sit has changed somewhat. A few years ago, this meant legislation to get people to adopt the correct posture and chairs with too many controls. Now designers such as Humanscale, SBS, Viasit and Wilkhahn create task seating that reflects the new reality: simpler and more humane, and so more in keeping with the need for people to keep moving rather than sitting still in an approved position.

Walter Knoll

Typical is the i–Workchair from designer Justus Kolberg for one of the few British firms on show, Senator. The only real nod to some future of work came in the form of a driverless car prototype from Mercedes with seats that rotate to face each other. Work has colonised nearly every human domain and, leaving aside phone calls, the car is next. Something that may be reflected in future shows.