Eindhoven based designers Maarten Kolk and Guus Kusters skillfully filter nature’s workings and materialize it into objects. Living with nature, the environment, history, time, colors and surroundings are indispensable sources of inspiration. Their work balances nature with culture and emphasizes the beauty of both worlds. Narrative connections, innovative use of materials and production processes lead them to make objects with a high level of aesthetic.

Maarten Kolk and Guus Kusters often take a natural phenomenon out of its context and integrate it with things we see, eat and touch everyday. This can be textures on animals, the motion of flying owls, fighting hares, which was the onset of their work ‘Avifauna’. Instead of mounting the skeletons of these animals with their own skin, they clothed them with materials from the human world that have corresponding traits. In the project ‘Watercourse’ they used unbleached, uncoated materials to make samples that were colored the blue-black ‘waste’ ink residue of a printer. In their latest project on acoustics for PROOFFLab, they mirror the softening properties of foggy clouds to make boxes that muffle, blur and package noisy things.

While researching into acoustics, Kolk and Kusters came to the conclusion that aural and visual tranquility is produced by very similar conditions and sets off the same sensation. In the words of Guus Kusters: ‘We quickly came to realize that silence is not the answer in this assignment for PROOFFLab. Removing sound doesn’t lead to just silence, but it changes your definition of noise. In a call center it’s probably easier to work undisturbed than in a room with one neighbor who’s constantly on the phone. In our view, it is the combination of sounds that predominate and the sharp tones causing unrest.’

Kolk and Kusters started to look for a way to reduce the sharpness of sounds in the immediate environment as well as to soften the noise of the visual surroundings. The designers recognized these properties in how foggy clouds don’t block or sharply divorce anything from its surroundings, rather, the fog adds to a certain calm. ‘We imagined what it would be like if you could place a cloud in your office, a very local fog bank, to package all chaos and roaring sounds around you.’ says Kusters.

By making rectangular cutouts of images of different weather types, they arrived at the idea of making boxes that mimic the softness, opaque look and the colors of clouds. This thought experiment was followed by testing materials and stretching them over a rectangular frame. Boxes in three different sizes were spanned by thin semi transparent latex. This material mutes sounds like a curtain does and it blurs in the way frosted glass puts everything in soft focus. The Cloud Boxes, as they came to be titled, come in three sizes for big, moderate, or small disorder. Large boxes might veil sections of a space or a bookcase, a lamp inside Cloud Box medium makes it a lampshade that spreads diffused light. With the small sized box you can hide things cluttering the desk. It has a handgrip and could be that one drawer which contains miscellaneous bits and pieces.

With no front or back, and no hinges but overlaps for openings, the boxes can be placed anywhere and the skin can be pulled aside like curtains to open on multiple sides. After withdrawing your hand, the skin shoots back into its flat shape and closes the box up automatically, to keep hidden what’s inside. Some of the latex is made into panels and some latex parts are stretched across multiple frame parts to form different compositions of overlapping skin. Inside, the frame hardly touches the latex, so the boxes keep their fuzzy shade.

Concept

Results

Cloud Box Large

Cloud Box Medium #1 

Cloud Box Medium #2 

Cloud Box Small #1 

Cloud Box Small #2 

Studio Maarten Kolk & Guus Kusters

info@mkgk.nl

mkgk.nl

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Klokgebouw 131

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The Netherlands

mk +31 641 811 326

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In this exploration of the office, we speculated on the workspace in relation to the reduction, the presence or absence of sound and other stimuli. How does everything around work correlate with sound, what factors are at play? How can you affect these and tune standard office design formats to benefit workers?

Our earlier survey of keywords, the ‘Dictionary of Acoustics’, made it possible to map how people and things influence the passage of sound. In a series of theoretical situations, we brought the various constituents of work and silence together in one single scenario. This gave us insight into the mode of interaction between objects and means, space and location, and program and method. In relation to perception, these dynamics strongly impact the way people experience work and how they function. And as offices changed over time, so did their dynamics and character. The drone of typewriters is replaced with softer clicks on keyboards and many phone conversations are turned into silent e-mails. Can the office turn into a silence industry? With the upcoming service industry in western economies, it’s important to design work environments as calm places for total concentration.

Example mode of interaction for the silence industry:

Objects and means: ‘What if surfaces in the office are soft to our senses?’

If the floor, the ceiling, cabinets, chairs, tables, cups and even the computer and keyboard are covered with felt, everything you feel, see and hear is muffled, which creates a calming constant.

Space and location: ‘What if a space amplifies noise so much, that your own echo’s command you to temper your voice?’

If acoustics is treated as a determinant of human behavior, it could add to a sense of place and direction, signage and zoning, and mark out codes of conduct. People automatically lower their voices in big cathedrals, when they’re confronted with the acoustics.

Program and method: ‘What if light and dark divisions create designated zones to heighten the senses at set times?’

If one single work device is isolated, it’s easier to concentrate on one task. You can focus only of the computer screen, in fact all you see is the lit screen while the rest is black and blind. Rather alike reading a book or doing embroidery after dark, in the pre-electricity era.