At the beginning of October, the next, eighth in a row, Vienna Design Week took place. The Austrian company Bene, a well-known manufacturer of office furniture, timed to this event both famous models and several new products in its showroom located in the north-western part of Vienna's Old Town, on Neutorgasse Street.
First of all, the showroom itself. A building designed by an Austrian bureau
Rataplan in 2005 and completed four years ago (however, the decoration was completed only by June 2012), neatly inscribed in a series of conservative buildings of the late 19th - first half of the 20th century. In places it recedes from the red line, forming a small square in front of the main entrance and another caesura from the opposite side of the street, but this is not the most interesting thing. The entire facade is covered with a grid of movable automatic lamellas, whose porous metal panels, folding and unfolding like an accordion, ride along guides installed at a decent (about 30 cm) distance from the glass-yellow facade. Folded, they are perpendicular to the facade, while fully extended they create a second metal shell that protects from the sun. The design of the lamellas and rails explains the rounded corners of the building, and the whole looks very technogenic - probably hinting at the conveyor from which about 600,000 units of Bene office furniture come off. “The facade works great,” the company's employees are proud to answer a natural question. From above, from behind the side of the exploited roof, quite live trees look out.
Inside - about 2300 m2 demonstration areas, of which 960 m2 is occupied by a sample exhibit, and the rest is office space where Bene employees work while displaying products.
The fall show was titled Co-creating tomorrow (literally: creating the future together) and centered around one theme: the benefits of collaboration when it is well organized, using both technology and comfortable office furniture and partitions. Indeed, a significant portion of the company's offerings occupy different places in the range between the collective and the private. Sound insulation at the level of the floor, walls, partitions (step on - you will hear how the material absorbs the sound of footsteps) is adjacent to a variety of tables for joint presentations: a container covered with a lid in the middle of the table allows you to hide the consoles and cables from the demonstration equipment.
A variety of chairs will not let you get bored, chairs with a complex back design take the shape of a body, stools of different heights and modest ottomans - however, everything within the framework of business seriousness a la the 21st century - allows you to settle down exactly as you like.
One of the hits of the Bene collection is several versions of the office "islands" -PARCS, upholstered with fabric shelters, in which you can place both a coat rack and a meeting room for five or even ten people. In essence, PARCS is a kind of office partition that has evolved into semi-closed structures, yet usually open at the top (with the exception of the Toguna series, which has a roof). The fabric and the panels surrounding the islet absorb a significant portion of the sounds, largely dampen the hum of many voices, and thus save the open space from noise.
The best version of the island in the opinion of many is its quintessence, a soundproof office in which you can retire by closing the door and finish urgent work in silence; the fact that the island is occupied is indicated simply - a red flag is raised above it. Inside there is a wonderful lamp, the light of which is turned on and regulated by the movement of a hand that does not press a button, but only moves nearby - a pleasant technogenic addition to the sterile (not distracting from the main) interior of the island. The smallest space of privacy is a "burrow" carved into a bookshelf; and the maximum island can accommodate about ten people. The range of sofa-like islands with rounded edges is complemented by the NOOXS series of study islands, which include, in particular, the "cave" inside the bookshelf.
All islands - volumes with characteristic soft contours somewhere on the verge between cozy and business - in the Bene collection are either plain and relatively bright (blue, green, burgundy), or covered with a fabric with a neutral background and the new Greenwich ornament, which represents a seemingly arbitrary interweaving of rare weakly curved lines woven against a neutral background. The ornament is extremely motivated: British designers from Pearson Lloyd developed it based on observations of the "ant paths" of visitors to Greenwich Park, thus replacing the arbitrary movement of the graphic artist's hand with the spontaneous movement of human masses. The authors call their collection "based on the rhythm of life and the structure of the city."
Due to their soft, sound-absorbing texture, the islands, which are so necessary to increase working capacity in the difficult environment of a buzzing open space, are almost homely, and are favorably set off by other hi-tech finds of Bene. Not so long ago, a new model of a table with a movable tabletop appeared, which a special mechanism (similar to the one that is installed on, not by night, be remembered, tow trucks) allows you to lower it to a height convenient for a child or raise it to the level of the hands of a standing person and, it seems, even higher. The old model of the table is slightly smaller, the new one is a little noisier, but larger and can support more weight.
A large, respectable meeting room is no longer separated by a meter-long wall that absorbs only part of the sounds, but a full-fledged glass wall up to the ceiling - you really can't hear anything inside. Obeying the built-in remote control, the blinds are lowered between the glasses, the illumination and the operation of the large screen are regulated.
The brainstorming collaboration screen is another novelty aimed at optimizing the benefits of office coexistence, the so-called nice wall, developed by Bene in collaboration with a university startup
we-inspire. The bottom line is that, firstly, the image is projected not on one, but on two or three screens: the working plane turns out to be quite large. Notes made on one screen can be transferred to another and grouped, building links between them. Secondly, it is not necessary to write on the screen: everything written with a special (with a sensor) pen on special (for example, from Bene) paper is immediately transferred to the screen and becomes part of the overall picture. Thus, not only those who “came to the blackboard”, but also everyone sitting in the “hall” and writing on notebooks, equally participate in the discussion.
The range of proposals, indeed, looks quite wide, varied and distinctly design, not average, experienced personally (although one can argue about the need to motivate a decorative pattern with the paths of a London park, which seems at least redundant, this technique is still very human). The reasons for the appearance of a fan of proposals from a funny stool-nail to a solid, equipped with smart-meeting room technology and a complex electronic screen is not difficult to explain: now an increasing number of people prefer to work at home and in coworking spaces, so the attractiveness of the office needs to be increased by developing its positive features: such as the ability to quickly arrange a meeting or, raising your head above the partition, ask a neighbor a question. And neutralizing the negative, for example, creating corners isolated from noise, using soft home textiles and giving employees more opportunities to freshen up the environment during the working day - in particular, reading, hiding in an array of bookshelf.
But the Russian reality tells us that everyone, following the example of the nineties, is still crazy about the savings that open space gives; in contrast to the Soviet cabinet system, employees are placed in cramped common rooms, and the "islands" in Russia are not very popular (perhaps more respectable for the bosses). But Bene is not discouraged and plans to push her ideas further.
You can get acquainted with Bene products on the website
bene.com/ru and in the Moscow showroom at 16 Strastnoy Boulevard.
