The outdoor market is a place of culture, economic exchange and above all relationships. Its vibrant and chaotic mood is the inspiration for Bahlara, the transgressive office furniture collection designed by Egidio Panzera for Faram 1957, presented yesterday in Milan.
An amazing furnishing collection that transgresses the usual rigid office system logic and offers as key elements the disorder, the discontinuity, the total reconfigurability. The same elements we can observe every day in the street markets.
A famous Sicilian market – Ballarò -inspired the name too: Balhara is its original Arabic name, explains the designer.
Just like every market around the world, the new workplace, focused on smart working, are generated by nomadism, unpredictability, chaos.
And Bahlara wants to interpret chaos and unpredictability without the presumption of bringing order into the office, with the intention of favoring and fostering relationships, a true sense of existing in the workplace.
It is an extremely articulated system based on a simple metal tube structure with its joints that allows you to create kiosks and workstations-stalls with canopy, pergola, tents and curtains.
All accompanied by an infinity of elements: desks, sofas, sound-absorbing screens, tables of various shapes and heights.
Customization at highest levels: architects can customize their office-market with finishing materials, covers, fabrics. And even users can easily adapt the sets according to their needs. “The settings we present here are only suggestions, there are no predefined formulas” explains Panzera.
The design integrates with extreme elegance raw materials of the urban furniture (the cement bases and the flower hanging vases) and lowly daily objects (cork stoppers, bamboo canes, crumpled curtains , draped or dangling).
The aesthetics of chaos is made by these details, unusual color combinations, and the incredible range of accessories, even if there are more “technological” components such as sound-absorbing screens, wiring, sit-stand desks (with electric linear actuators by Linak).
Some doubts:
How many companies are “culturally” ready to create a headquarters based on the concept of “disorder” that always puts fear to managers?
This richness of signs, shapes, colors will not really be the element that will tire the users?
Will Bahlara be able to become a masterpiece, a new archetype for the office or is it destined to age earlier than expected?
Text by Renata Sias
