Established in 2005 by Signe Bindslev Henriksen and Peter Bundgaard Rützou, Space Copenhagen is a spatial and product design studio based in Copenhagen but collaborates on projects all around the world. The design duo sat down during Amsterdam's Glue design festival with Frame’s editor at large, Tracey Ingram, to discuss how they got into furniture design, sustainability, and their latest collaborations with &Tradition.
Why don't you start by telling us a bit about yourself about the practice?
SIGNE BINDSLEV HENRIKSEN: We met 30 years ago at the Academy of Architecture and have been practicing as Space Copenhagen for the past 16 years. We felt this mutual appetite for both architecture but also small-scale spaces which cater to different human interactions and experiences. In the early years, we started with smaller private projects, restaurants, and retail components, which grew over time. It was during our early restaurant projects where we began to dive into doing custom furniture for those specific spaces. Outside of custom projects, furniture design has been a big part of our work for the past 15 years.
For &Tradition, Space Copenhagen designed a series of glass and tableware, Collect, which plays on scale of design.
What is the relationship between designing something, say, as small as the Collect glassware series for &Tradition and spaces?
PETER BUNDGAARD RÜTZOU: There are endless paths. You can go as wide as architecture, into the abstract notion of how you distribute an organized space, but you can also go as small as this glass series. That's one of the true pleasures of doing what we do. We don't have a specific plan of where we're heading, but we tend to have a lot of conversation and then let our intuition guide us on what the possibilities are for a project or product and then dive into these doors that open along the way and try to enjoy it.
The Fly chair and sofa were one of the studio's first collaborations with &Tradition. The duo was briefed to reinterpret classic design pieces for modern use.
You talk about this entry into product design being through custom pieces for projects that you've done in the past, which are specific to that location. But you can design something like the Rotate cart for &Tradition which can go in any number of spaces. How is the working process different for both of these approaches?
SBH: It is slightly different, but I would say that it also depends on the relationship you have with the manufacturer. In this case, &Tradition is such a vibrant company, fuelled by a passion for architecture and spaces. Even the Fly sofa and Loafer chair we are sitting on, and all the extensions of these, were developed to fit the needs of our projects.
PBR: These two furniture groups, Fly and Loafer, were some of our earliest collaborations with &Tradition. The brief was to reinterpret heritage pieces. But one of the restraints of classic pieces is that they were created for a different social context. These furniture pieces constitute a different encounter with your everyday life, one slightly more formal in nature. The design of Fly and Loafer was an exercise in trying to keep the language of tradition in balance with accommodating a modern lifestyle.
Space Copenhagen got its start in furniture design through creating custom pieces for specific projects. The Rotate cart was born out of a need to provide storage in a number of settings.
Spatial typologies are blurring together, meaning that our spaces increasingly require more flexibility. Does the convergence of, say, workspaces and hotel rooms change how you design them?
PBR: Typologies are moving towards each other: hospitality is being domesticated and vice versa, our homes have also become offices. All these different separations are merging. But on the other hand, if you want people to feel something from a space or a product it needs to be constituted as something they can identify with. This puts a limit to how flexible things can become because, with too much, it risks lacking personality and purpose. You need to determine what your strongholds are in each case and you need to be daring about making some definite choices that cannot change. That creates the bone structure of whatever you're doing.
SBH: Rotate, for instance, was intentionally created as a versatile piece of furniture. We both experienced a need for something which didn't look too much like office furniture and had a playfulness about it but also catered to our storage needs. We don’t mean flexible in the way that you constantly move it from your bedroom to the bathroom, but that it has the possibility of taking up surprising functions in many parts of the of the home, hotel or hospitality space. We love the openness afforded by a piece which allows for people to be able to put their own identity into its use.
The Loafer chair for &Tradition was originally designed for a hospitality setting but embodies the studio's affinity to versatility.
How do you navigate that local culture of wherever you are coming from this Scandinavian heritage?
SBH: We were born and raised into this very minimalist, Scandinavian way of aesthetics. But we also decided very early on that we needed to keep our own curiosity and our own view on life. Though we could be constantly moving elsewhere and be open and be open to new ideas, we also have certain things that we are attached to because of our heritage. This Scandinavian perspective opens us to investigate the local materials and special craft, as well as the aspirations of our clients and collaborators.
PBR: When we started looking at what is Scandinavian design essentially, and what constituted these iconic pieces, we very quickly identified it's not one thing. It originates from a bunch of designers whose curiosities drove their creative motors. The way of understanding our design heritage is inherently tied to looking at something that's different from where you come from and identifying the layers of culture that differ and bringing them back and trying to work with them and apply them to your own specific cultural context. We're fortunate being from a place in the world where we have the access to that way of thinking.
Rotate was designed to be flexible in that 'it has the possibility of taking up surprising functions in many parts of the home, hotel or hospitality space,' explains Signe Bindslev Henriksen.
How does sustainability affect your work?
SBH: It's just recently that we were presented with &Tradition’s new philosophy on sustainability. Now we are looking into how we can improve the transportation of materials and products, the way the lacquer is applied, the actual sustainability of the materials we are using, and so on. It’s not just moving forward, it's also looking back at some of the things we thought were actually fine and seeing how can we improve them.
PBR: We also need to think about how can we ensure that our products don't end up being waste. When they break and they need repair, how can that happen locally? At the end of a product’s lifecycle, how can it be dismantled in a way where we ensure its reuse? That's what is so interesting about &Tradition’s sustainability program, because it's something you must think about early on in the design process. Things are certainly changing for the better, and it's an interesting challenge, but it will require rethinking how we all do things now.
