“FURNITURE” Off-White™
OFF-WHITE c/o VIRGIL ABLOH™ Defining the grey area between black and white
“Virgil Abloh” In Chicago, a city of architectural and design pioneers, Virgil Abloh experiences the modern world to the full. With all his sensors on and in working order, he testifies to the freedom of expression of a generation born with new information and communication technologies (NICT). This is very much his generation as he was born in 1980 and relishes his role in this societal revolution. Virgil Abloh takes a keen interest in history and its evolutionary cycles, his knowledge enables him to compare the upheaval in today’s society with the Renaissance period he studied in university.
c/o Virgil Abloh Text by Anne Bony
“FRAMING” His first furniture collection entitled Framing is a logical continuation of this thought process. A visual communication of the ideal that the grid can support in a current space and current time. It constitutes a new means with which to satisfy Abloh’s urge to invest a space. Not unlike Andrea Branzi’s No-Stop City, (1969), a theoretical project that proposed a model for global urbanisation, Virgil Abloh implements the idea of the disappearance of furniture inside the house. He creates a critical utopia based on a realist vision of design as a conceptual tool that modifies lifestyles. The habitat becomes a place that can be lived as a creative and personal activity by the individual. This radical analysis of architecture and design thus proposes a model of immaterial objects that have been divested of all symbolic value.
The Framing plays with transparency and inhabits the space discreetly, almost providing a ghostly shell-like presence. This is an “open source� collection that allows the objects to be appropriated, with no limits.The functional volumes of Framing collection are neutral, minimalist and intelligible, designed using an underlying structure of iron wires, taking inspiration from his architectural profession, resulting in a form of elevation. The musky leather on the bench brings a note of natural sensuality.
The mechanical manufacturing of the structure of the pieces contrasts with the artisanal engraving of the words “Off” and “White”, the letters scarify the surface of the marble for eternity, not unlike grave stones.