Vola workers get a surprise visit

You don’t need us to tell you that these have been unsettling and testing times. For many, the very stuff of day-to-day life – the reassuring routines, the catch-ups with colleagues, the purpose and small pleasures of working life – were taken away.

Lockdowns and lockouts reminded us that the places where we work generate community, shared culture and shared meaning. We understood in new ways that the best workplaces are driven by a commitment to craft, collaboration, and yes, celebration. They are the places we come together to do our best.

Commitment to craft and inspiring products

The Danish tap and mixer maker Vola knows all about what it takes, the collective effort required, to create inspiring, meaningful products. In the late 1960s, it worked with Arne Jacobsen, a founding father of modern Danish design, to re-invent the tap. Together they developed the HV1, a contemporary design icon and an essential fixture in design museums – in their collections and their bathrooms – and anywhere functional and formal elegance and perfect proportions are a priority.

The company has been producing its taps and mixers, versions of Jacobsen’s design and later designs, in Denmark for over 50 years. Vola is committed to the idea that a beautifully thought out, designed, engineered and crafted product can have a profound impact on our daily lives. And it takes a special place to create those products.

Letting the music play

Earlier this year it decided to celebrate that place and what happens there, organising a very special performance at its factory in Horsens. Vola’s employees were treated to the crashing gongs, stomping timpani and heart-stirring horns of the first bars of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, all performed live.

Vola had invited part of the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra to the facility to give their first live performance since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic. It was an invitation the orchestra was happy to accept.

Founded in 1935 and based in the nearby Aarhus Symphonic Hall, the orchestra is committed to social outreach concerts. But that mostly happened at schools. This was a chance to take their music out of the concert hall and into the community.

‘It was amazing to play live music for real people,’ said Jesper Nordin, Artistic Director at the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra. ‘Normally, we invite people to join us in a concert hall, but this time we were invited to be a part of the daily life of everyone at the Vola factory – and it was such a great experience.’

Music as metaphor

For Vola, the symphony orchestra is the perfect metaphor for what happens at their factory. It is the right notes at the right moment, carefully choreographed. But more than that, it is a community of craftspeople coming together to create something greater and more meaningful than the sum of its parts, it is relationships built on trust and mutual respect, and it generates a collective pride and sense of what is possible with a shared, common purpose. Vola’s musical flashmob was also a moment of unity, a celebration of real human connection, increasingly neglected in our digital-first world, of the Danish approach to mindful living.

Later the orchestra performed part of Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin at the Vola Academy. Ravel wrote the piece to commemorate friends he had lost in World War I but the piece feels less an elegy than a celebration of life. It is a work that has the cascading momentum of waterfalls, the steady pull of a fast stream and still pond-like moments of reflection. It is water as the stuff of life, an idea that Vola understands as well as anyone.

© Architonic