#design
First out in a coming series of blog post about some of our classical products is the sofa Orgy, designed by Karim Rashid. The stories about these products are taken from our book “OFFECCT: Voices“.
Karim Rashid was born in Egypt, raised in England, educated in Canada, and worked in Italy for a few years before opening his own studio in New York in 1993.
Karim Rashid
Rashid himself describes his work as a marriage of organic and geometric design, of technology and material, with soft, friendly organic forms that communicate tactility and express a strong visual comfort and pleasure.
The sofa Orgy comes with an ottoman that fits into the sofa like a jigsaw puzzle. They melt together like one united piece. The idea to the sofa came from Rashid’s reflections around how a turned on television dominates a room, and how it results in human interaction and conversation being put to the side. Rashid wanted to create what he calls “a socially engaging sofa like those of the eighteenth and nineteenth century – furniture for human discourse.”
Sofa Orgy by Karim Rashid
The resulting design was the Orgy, a sofa with a rounded profile allowing people to almost face each other. It converts easily into an enclosed cocoon-like bed with the simple use of an ottoman.
The piece is quite large and has a compound curved back structure; so multiple prototypes were produced in the development stage to get the upholstery right. There were a lot of trial and error adjustments to make it appear much lighter and freer, using the smallest legs possible and very few of them.
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