Pushing Boundaries with Modular Steel FurnitureInspiration from USM’s award-winning “HomeWork” exhibition at Salone del Mobile 2018
At this year’s Salone del Mobile, Swiss modular furniture brand USM collaborated with the Dutch architectural practice UNstudio to explore the ever-blurring lines between home and work. Today, work rules our lives, and technology allows work to invade our leisure time even more; as digital natives, we are increasingly mobile and ready to set up office wherever we are.
In this exhibition, USM is exploding the rooms in which this lifestyle blurring takes place by creating hybrid domestic and office environments hidden within. As a result, cafés look like living rooms, home offices are replaced by co-working spaces.
Booth visitors were invited to consider the shifting boundaries of home and work life, as well as share their thoughts on areas such as “What keeps you up at night?” to “Where do your best ideas come from?” Part installation, part research centre; the feedback from the exhibition will inspire the brand’s forthcoming summer work house in Berlin, to explore the topic further and consider how can we learn more at work.
As the brand’s largest furniture build, the stand was crafted from 1,015 panels, 13,318 connectors and tubes and 5,008 balls, weighed 8.9 tonnes, in the creation of four rooms that combined both domestic and work elements. Winner of two Frame Awards Milan, including the best use of material, this highly sustainable stand can be used again for other projects in future. ‘In addition to being a strong spatial statement, the USM booth design embodies the brand and its modularity,’ says Floor Kuitert, one the Frame Awards judges.
Although we cannot bring this theatrical installation home, let’s discover its colourful storage solution crafted in Switzerland from our edits.