Fossvik Works
- Hong Kong SAR
- Rune Bakke
- Commercial
- 2023
The client makes furniture in Europe and sells it across Asia, and had been running the Hong Kong operation from a conventional office floor that had nothing to do with the work. The brief was to build a place where a prototype could be assembled, photographed, sat in and argued over without leaving the room.
The plan is one long room with a bench down the middle. The bench is a working surface — beech, sixteen metres, at standing height — and it is where samples are laid out, drawings are compared and lunch happens. Desks sit against the windows on one side and the material library runs the full length of the other. Meetings take place at the bench.
The floor is at the twenty-first level of a tower with a view most tenants would have organised the plan around; we turned the desks toward it and then did nothing else about it. The wall opposite the glazing is deliberately blind and holds the library: shelves in the same beech, open, running floor to ceiling, carrying stone, timber, textile and metal samples in the quantities a working studio actually needs.
Because the building's services are inflexible, everything we added is demountable. The bench bolts together. The library is a cleated system that unhooks. The two enclosed rooms — one for calls, one for photography — are timber-framed boxes that stand free of the structure and are lined, on the inside, in the same undyed linen used in the client's upholstery. Nothing is fixed to the base build except lighting.
There is no reception. Visitors arrive at the near end of the bench, which is where somebody is usually working.