Page 43 - Yellow by TCW Issue 4

Moving Walls in use on the occasion of the fair Neue Räume in Zurich, 2017.
that the processes don’t have to adjust to the tools, or the physical working environment”, explains Frick.
At this time Jörg Boner was brought to develop these tools. The Zurich-based designer is award winning and well-known for his smart designs. His vision was a giant sheet of paper floating in the room, different from an ordinary whiteboard in that it is mobile and not too heavy, and its geometry ensures a smooth shift to the next whiteboard. After all, the walls must be able to be transported to economic forums around the world, quickly assembled on site, connected
and moved by the users without little effort.
What particularly fascinated Boner, who is normally more focused on classic furniture design, was the fact that his design was to become a product that helped a philosophy to be applied. “The Moving Wall has completely different demands on the design than furniture for private use. Its functionality
is clearly in the foreground, and yet there is no denying that it has a certain aesthetic appeal.”
The famous guiding principle of the American architect Louis Sullivan, according to which form should follow function, is included insofar as that
the shape of the Moving Wall results from the tasks
it is supposed to fulfil. “We didn’t want the wall to protrude from anything in order to have more legroom, which is why we had to give it a slope supporting the writing process”, says Boner. It’s trapezoidal because you don’t need curved elements in this way, but you can simply connect the walls in reverse to achieve
a curve. In addition, the wheels had to be both
flexible and resilient, and for the optimum varnish, 41 the company asked a start-up company at ETH
Zurich to find out more about nanotechnology.
This took a lot of time, eight years from the first iteration to the Moving Wall we have today. The brothers Frick and Jörg Boner did not hide in a workshop, the development phase was a constant work in progress, in which each generation of walls
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