Page 109 - Sharp: The Book For Men FW21

Jan Christian is convinced that the companies hoping con- sumer interest in sustainability is just a passing fad are, frankly, screwed. “Those companies and those brands will be out of business a couple of years from now. I am 100 per cent confident in that,” he says. The flip side: the companies that not only talk the talk, but also walk the walk are well-positioned. “It helps to be the first one doing it, even though it’s risky and costs a lot of money,” says Jan Christian. “But someone has to lead the way.”
Vestre’s growing profitability has brought private equity funds calling, but Jan Christian has no intention of letting the company out of family hands. “We want to keep Vestre as a
family-owned company because we want to make sure that the values behind the company are still here after 50 years.” In other words, keeping it in the family ensures Vestre will be guided by its moral compass, not short-term profits.
In fact, Vestre often turns down lucrative contracts when they come with thorny strings attached — hostile designs like spikes on ledges, or armrests that prevent sleeping on benches. “I’m not sure if I would have kept my job as CEO if we were owned by some kind of private equity fund,” muses Jan Christian. “[But] hostile design has never been right. If we have a society where some people can’t afford a proper place to live, that’s something we should deal with by political and social reforms. It’s not my job to provide designs [whose] only purpose is to keep the [most vulnerable] members of our societies away from our public spaces.”
For Vestre, the whole point of street furniture is, in fact, to achieve the opposite. Back in 1987, Vestre’s tubular Hvilan bench carried high design out of private homes and into the public at a time when streets and parks were dotted with run-of-the- mill garden benches. For Jan Christian, providing the public with good design is inherently democratic. And while bringing people together has always been Vestre’s goal, it’s become even more important in an era of deepening polarization, withering dialogue, and worsening culture wars. But, unsurprisingly, Jan Christian is convinced that street furniture can help.
When Vestre works with its designers, it encourages them to think not about creating furniture in its most traditional sense, but instead as social installations that facilitate human interac- tion. “Our goal is to bring people together by creating meeting places where people across different cultures and backgrounds can interact and get to know each other, because that’s how we can build mutual trust and togetherness and hopefully contribute to a less polarized world,” says Jan Christian. “I’ve seen so many examples of how our social installations contribute to human interaction in places where people didn’t have any place to sit and talk to strangers and meet new people before.”
The Plus is, in many ways, just like one of Vestre’s benches or seating areas jacked up on steroids. When it’s completed, it will transform a factory — the most walled-off, least inviting, least social type of building — into a public space to be shared. But Jan Christian dreams big, and, naturally, his hopes for The Plus reach far beyond this stretch of Norwegian forest. If all goes according to plan, the building will be a prototype that could be replicated elsewhere — and it could pose some interesting questions for the future of cities. Namely, if factories aren’t so dirty, ugly, and dangerous, do they need to be walled off in suburban industrial parks? In theory, cleaner, prettier factories could precipitate their return to cities, nearer to where people live. As Jan Christian sees it, this wouldn’t result in the revival of Dickensian Londons, buried under layers of coal soot, but would instead mean less commuting and, therefore, less individual car ownership. “If we can show this is the future of manufacturing, imagine what kind of impact that could have for all the global megacities. That could bring huge change to the world,” he says.
Is it all a bit doe-eyed to think that an outdoor seating area, no matter how sustainably made or pleasing to the eye, could help tackle complex issues like polarization? Or that a new starchitect-designed factory could reorganize cities? Or that one small family-owned furniture manufacturer could prove to the world that economic success and sustainability go hand in hand, ultimately setting off a chain of events to keep impending climate doom at bay? Well, maybe. Probably. But it’s too early to say for sure. Jan Christian’s optimism is welcome and Vestre’s actions even more so. “Talk doesn’t change anything. Real action and bold decisions do,” he says. “[And] yes, maybe it is naive. But I don’t care. Maybe naive people do change the world.”
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