Orgatec 2012: Stand-up by Thorsten Franck “for” Wilkhahn

Anyone who had anything to do with the UK childrens toy market of the 1970s – either as a user (child) or consumer (adult) – will be well aware that no matter how hard you try, how hard you push them and how devilish you are, Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down.

Stand-up by Thorsten Frank applies a similar logic, albeit in the more urbane world of furniture.

The concept isn’t new, indeed it could even be said that stools that rock and flow with your body are a fully established furniture genre and most us will be acquainted with the innumerate numbers of “rocking sitting systems” available on the market – each more abhorrent than the next and all devoid of even the slightest semblance of a formal plan.

Like some really bad late 90s chick-lit novel, features are seemingly added to satisfy some functional or marketing requirement without any consideration given to the complete composition.

Stand-up by Thorsten Franck is in contrast an early Irvine Welsh short story – racy, impudent, undaunted – and is pretty much the first product we’ve seen in this genre  that has genuinely appealed to us.

Looking at Thorsten’s website one can clearly see that Stand-up is the culmination of a long student project, one we never saw but which, judging by the date of the last website update, Wilkhahn saw in Milan in April 2011.

At the moment it is officially only a prototype – hence the inverted commas in the post title – but considering the money Wilkhahn have invested in Cologne: the plan is to produce it. Unless the feedback is truly woeful. Which it wont be.

And swaying back and forth there as they do like some menacing crop of incandescent mushrooms, Stand-up already looks like a Wilkhahn project.

On the one hand there are the all too obvious parallels to the successful ON office chair; indeed the green version looks like some sort of heavily pared down ON. It’s a visual illusion we know, but the association with ON gives Stand-up an authenticity and a seriousness that no other producer could bestow it.

Then the colours, a range that are very much in keeping with those chosen by Stefan Diez for his Chassis Chair and which have the effect of further aligning Stand-up with Wilkhahn and thus drawing it ever more into the fold.

Add to that Thorsten’s intelligent approach to solving the problem and a design that is as simple as it genial and you have a well rounded, considered but for all excellently realised object.

Although on display at Orgatec Stand-up is, for us, a product for home and office, and while, yes, it reeks like the sort of product “Start ups” would buy to compliment the de rigueur table football and table tennis tables  … you can’t help lovn’ it.