Design Secrets: Furniture 50 Real-Life Projects Uncovered

Osorom Chair, Konstantin Grcic In an act that would prove prophetic, Konstantin Grcic named his mashed , wire­framed computer image representing a kind of public seating Osorom, which is the manufacturer Moroso spelled backward. “It is quite contradictory to what they usually do,” he notes

“A few years ago, Moroso furniture celebrated their 50th anniver­sary by inviting fifty designers and architects to submit ideas about furniture linked to rapid prototyping. All we had to do was send digital data, and they’d create 3D images and put the design ideas into an exhibition,” he recalls. “This intrigued me because I thought, we design a beautiful thing, and send to them, and don’t concern ourselves with how it’s made.” Grcic glibly describes the result of this exercise as a “squashed piece of a round thing with holes in it. I saw it as a seating island for public spaces, where comfort was not a prime issue. Just as a place to rest.”

However, the perverse name of the product seems to have un­leashed a whole long process of contradictions. To start, Moroso fell in love with the design and decided they wanted to make this completely unrealistic item real. “When they first said they wanted to make it, I didn’t take them seriously,” Grcic says. “I thought it was impossible and that would be the end of the story.” But Moroso didn’t give up. “That’s one of the great things about the Italian furniture industry,” Grcic notes. “It works be­cause of people who have a real passion for these kinds of things, and they have an attitude that everything is possible. They say, ‘We just make a few phone calls and we’ll find someone who will agree to make it.’ Which is exactly what happened,” he recalls. “We were on the manufacturing floor, someone started making some calls, and half an hour later, this guy appears, who looks like Einstein. He lives in a village down the road and builds rally cars for off-road racing, working in fiberglass. He looked at the piece and said, ‘Yeah, it’s not a problem.’ In Italy, they have a belief that if it’s beautiful and they want to make it, they will.”

However, after about ten days, all beauty aside, ‘Einstein’ decided he couldn’t make the piece after all. Then a relative of the owner of Moroso, known by one and all as Uncle Marino, said he would do it. “And the thing is,” says Grcic, “he did. Single handedly, he made the first prototype. He used a kind of electric jigsaw to cut out the holes from fiberglass. It was quite crazy. He produced this 3D full-scale prototype of my little computer CAD drawing. Of course, Uncle Marino doesn’t use the digital data; he took the di­mensions and then drew the grid by hand and cut out the holes. It shows how someone who is skilled and has an educated and trained eye for design —he’s been working with designers his whole life —had a sensitivity for what I had in my mind, and he was able to translate it into this full-scale thing.”

@ Uncle Marino uses a jigsaw to cut individual pieces from a monolithic piece of fiberglass for the first—and what was supposed to be the only—Osorom chair. Credit: KGID office

® Shown here is one half of the tool that is used to create the production model Osorom, made of a unique, Hirek plastic that has a structure similar to human bone. Credit: KGID office