Layout Modular Sofa | By Numen / For Use
A Modular Crossover between Architecture and Design
Layout was designed as a modular crossover between architecture and design. It embodies the configuration of a spatial algorithm that creates a soft interior landscape, fitting for larger spaces. Its pragmatic design brings the ultimate comfort of a home sofa into an office environment, hotel lobby, or airport lounge, offering a cocoon of privacy. With its seamlessly interconnected seats and poufs, it generates a soft terrain of sloping surfaces that are also pliable for leisure and socializing at home. Even in smaller spaces, the Layout’s individual elements can be used to create islands or clusters for various situational contexts. With its predominant functionalism, Layout is a quintessential example of Numen/ForUse aesthetics.
Radically simple and clean, the design is led by the idea of a three-dimensional spatial composition that contradicts the traditional definitions of an L-shaped sofa and interior. This concept provides a solution for your entire interior design project based solely on four basic elements - seater with backrest, two corners, and a pouf. The system allows for functionality by building endless interior configurations. Layout’s fundamentally neutral character can thus become dominant, depending on the person composing the space.
Technical Info
- Suspension solid wood, plywood
- Seat & backrest HR foam, polyester wadding
- Base PVC / metal platform height 8 cm + powder coating
- Upholstery fabric
Dimensions
- One Seater: 35.4"w | 35.4"d | Height Alternatives: 28.3" / 30.3" / 31.9" | Seat Height with No Leg: 11.4" | Legs: 1.2" / 3.1" / 4.7" ||| Overall Height with No Leg: 27.2"
Numen / For Use
Numen/For Use is an internationally acclaimed design collective led by product designers Sven Jonke, Christoph Katzler and Nikola Radeljković. For the past 20 years the group has been active globally in the fields of industrial and spatial design, scenography and conceptual art. Numen’s distinctive experimental vigor and interdisciplinary approach is reflected in the variety of objects and spaces they design for Prostoria. Their visual language is consciously reduced and implicit, and their concepts are strongly based in form and formal expression, while grounded in respect for local modernist heritage and its wide societal impact. Their designs for Prostoria include Polygon, Oblique and Trifidae easy chairs, Oblikant, Bik, Dobra and Osmo chairs, and Revolve, Layout, Absent, Segment, Combine and Fade sofas.
Prostoria
We tend to perceive furniture as something abstract, created on designers’ desks and then produced, branded and placed on the market by companies with different statuses and reputations. In fact, relations inside the contemporary globalized furniture industry are becoming more and more fragmented with less and less opportunity for complete dedication to synergies and collaborations… Prostoria, as a young company whose catalogue already comprises some new icons such as the Polygon armchair and the Revolve transformable sofa, stands as an example of a different and more traditional approach based on the evolution from the local factuality and logical clustering of all actors involved in the production process.
Rapid development of Prostoria, formerly known as Kvadra, a company which has come a long way, from “starting from zero” to positioning itself as the leader and promoter of new ideas in only a few years time, is a story about the reintroduction of continuity both in Croatia and Central Europe, a region with vital but insufficiently recognized design scene and remarkable tradition and knowledge of the furniture industry. Those elements served as latent potentials that provided grounds for continuation and had to be activated.
Since the beginning, Prostoria has been developing an integrative approach, functioning as a collaboration platform that nourishes and stimulates continuous exchange of knowledge and experience between all the actors participating in the production of furniture. A dynamic workshop ambience has been created offering opportunities mainly to young designers to explore their ideas in excellent conditions and bring them to the highest level of design, functionality and technological artisanship. Many products have been developed over longer periods of time surpassing a number of iterations until reaching their final form, which would be impossible without the adequate support combining the contemporary technology and meticulous craftsmanship and handwork of the highest quality. Predominantly local materials are used, especially solid wood, and most of the production takes place within the company itself or in collaboration with local cooperatives.
While the company’s catalogue also offers furniture based on tested models, Prostoria shows strategic and even passionate dedication to research-based design, convinced that authenticity has its place on the market but presents a special challenge in the times when it seems almost impossible to create truly innovative and fresh concepts. For that reason, Prostoria’s social responsibility and specific position have to be observed as a contribution to the evolution of design and readiness to take the risk in order to reach new values for the benefit of users and the culture. Thus, Prostoria stands as a project inside of which designers grow together with the company on the grounds of mutual trust and shared goals.
