Kimball Showroom / NeoCon 2016
O+A’s third year designing Kimball Office’s showroom at NeoCon presented both client and designer with the challenge of making a familiar space new. Three iterations in three years of the same existing space initiated a contemplation on the meaning of place—specifically on how technology and modern communications have changed that meaning.
O+A’s third year designing Kimball Office’s showroom at NeoCon presented both client and designer with the challenge of making a familiar space new. Three iterations in three years of the same existing space initiated a contemplation on the meaning of place—specifically on how technology and modern communications have changed that meaning.
City Chicago
Year 2016
Size 16,000 sf
Team Primo Orpilla, Verda Alexander, Elizabeth Vereker, Olivia Ward, Al McKee, Tova Schachter, Dani Canepa
Photographer Jasper Sanidad
Finding Community
Our sense of place now can be no-place or many places at once. The individual creates a place. Events create the place. A destination is not a point on a map, but who occupies that point. To have an impact in today’s economy a place must be more than its geography or its cultural traditions; it must have a purpose that generates community.
Same Space, New Place
With that thought as a theme, O+A sought out four of Kimball’s featured designers—Primo Orpilla, Daniel Korb and the team of Pam Light and John Duffy—and created individual structures reflecting each designer’s sensibility, philosophy and aesthetic preferences. Drawing on answers to a series of offbeat interview questions (The zoo is closing. What animal do you take?), these striking visualizations created three new places in the same old place at the Merchandise Mart—demonstrating Kimball’s commitment as a furniture manufacturer to look at every space and function anew.
Artful Efficiency
Primo Orpilla explores junkyards and architectural salvage sites. In rescued wood and steel retired from its original purpose he perceives lost evolutions of design—and formulates their next iterations. An Orpilla piece grows organically from the experience of using it. Each is an exercise in turning work into a more and more natural process and work furniture into a vehicle for making it effortless. The goal: a work tool that doesn’t look like a tool and doesn’t feel like work—even as it allows you to get the job done.
