Better Together: COR Lab

Sometimes a nice bit of unintended wordplay can go a long way.

Take long-established premium furniture manufacturer COR, for example, whose name, in English at least, speaks to the long-standing, central position it enjoys in the European market and beyond. Renowned for the quality and innovation of its products, in particular its sofas, the brand is one of those big hitters that’s helped shaped seating culture in the home for over half a century.

But while COR’s uber-comfortable furniture may invite users to put their feet up, the company itself never does, constantly striving to respond to the ever-evolving landscape of how we live. And now, for the first time, how we work.

For the manufacturer’s latest venture, which sees the strategic transfer of its deep know-how in producing residential furniture to products for the workspace, aims both to answer the increasing need for flexible seating and surfaces that facilitate the growing culture of flexible, collaborative working and to help drive this very phenomenon.

Practising what the spirit of the project preaches, the brand’s new COR Lab programme – which receives its public premiere at this January’s edition of imm cologne – is at once an ongoing collaborative workshop, drawing on an interdisciplinary collection of emerging-designer talents, and the resulting physical collection of new typology-shifting furniture designs.

The brainchild of COR chief Leo Lübke, along with industrial designer Professor Uwe Fischer, the first phase of COR Lab brought together three working partners: the studios of Aust & Amelung, Relvaokellermann and Pauline Deltour. “It was an opportunity,” explains Fischer, “for COR to open itself up to a new generation of designers, to create a new generation of products. Advancing technology has established new ways of working, ones that dissolve the boundaries between the living space and the workspace, the private and the public.”

The major global trend in coworking exemplifies this trajectory and was, rather neatly, reflected in the approach taken by the team itself. Fischer, who acted as laboratory mentor and moderator, was responsible for the various briefs, which specified a table with a bench, a room-divider system, a sofa, a stool and a number of side-furniture pieces. “The designers were invited to develop hybrid objects that would function in different contexts and combinations, and excel via the designer’s own signature, their manufacturing quality and their functionality.”

The creative studios, having immersed themselves in COR’s production culture and become new best friends with the development department’s experts, worked up their concepts separately, yet joined forces later for a group presentation to the manufacturer. This shared platform provided the opportunity to explore how each element might work as part of a programmatic whole, one design informing another.

Paris-based product designer Pauline Deltour, who cut her professional teeth working at design grandee Konstantin Grcic’s studio, has delivered the new multifunctional Floater sofa – purposed not only for sitting, but also for working, communicating and storing – and the eminently stackable Drop stool, while Munich design duo Ana Relvão and Gerhardt Kellermann challenge existing design typologies with their room-dividing system Chart. The category-defying architectural element provides visual and aural privacy, as well as incorporating a desk surface and shelving, depending on how it’s configured. Rather than a passive spatial intervention that merely separates two zones, it functions, in itself, as an activity zone.

German design studio Aust & Amelung’s super-graphic Bond family of archly mobile, peripheral furniture, meanwhile, fits hand-in-glove into the overarching COR Lab programme. Side tables, with or without wheels, and serving carts can be deployed when and moved where needed, according the fluid requirements of users.

Uwe Fischer himself has brought the Level table to the table, as it were, which features a intriguing clamping system, allowing its height to be adjusted and making it suitable for dining, working and meeting. While the upholstered Bridge bench (also designed by Fischer) invites group seating with its wide span, and at the same time spans functions – it serves as both seating and as an island solution. And underpinning the entire COR Lab collection is a carefully considered, consistent material language, with any colour concept also possible.

So committed to the concept to collaboration are the various design actors that make up the COR Lab team that they spent three days in Hamburg’s Hafenstudio being filmed and photographed interacting with the furniture, bringing it to life for the company’s marketing campaign. “Different designers coming together to engage with a single topic can only benefit everyone involved,” maintains Fischer, “both on the designer and the manufacturer side. Self-confidence and trust are critical, of course.”

When it comes to the future landscape of work, COR Lab is most definitely working it.

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You'll find COR at imm cologne 2018 in Hall 11.3, Stand S10/T11 and COR Lab Special in Hall 11.3, Stand T12.

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