Intense Listeners

The first Bloomberg terminal debuted in 2003, two flat screens fixed onto a stainless-steel assembly, more redolent of modern furniture than computer design. (In 2007, Antenna produced a second version of the terminal featuring adjustable screens.) The unit is accompanied by a custom elongated keyboard with color-coded function keys. “Bloomberg’s product is information,” Moeslinger says. “But they wanted users to have a connection to the service after their monitors were switched off. We tried to create a status symbol, almost an object of desire, something that would stand out among the other monitors on the trading floor.”

It hasn’t been all bits and bodies for Moeslinger and Udagawa. Thirteen years in New York—and its galleries, museums, and public spaces—have inspired them to venture into interactive art installations. In Firefly, a 2001 piece at the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage, the pair distributed backlit Palm Pilot screens to visitors to guide them through the darkened exhibition space and create the illusion of a flock of fireflies. In Blowing Gently, a 2002 work at Manhattan’s Frederieke Taylor Gallery, visitors blew through a polished aluminum ring (reminiscent of a child’s soap-bubble toy) to project an abstract human form onto a long white slab beneath them. “It does wonders for our design to be able to work in art,” Moeslinger says. “In some circles, we’ve been typecast as equipment designers because of our subway work. And most of our design clients have specific agendas that we need to accommodate. Art allows us to try things that may be risky or even irrelevant in a commercial context.”

Ironically, it was Antenna’s “irrelevant” work that helped it land what may be its biggest job yet: Antenna Workspaces, which Knoll will (finally) present at this year’s NeoCon. “I was walking in front of Bloomingdale’s on Lexington Avenue and saw a window installation,” recalls Benjamin Pardo, Knoll’s senior vice president for design. The installation, Antenna’s Power Flower, featured 32 five-foot-tall neon flowers that pedestrians could trigger as they passed by the storefront. “It was around 11 p.m.,” Pardo says. “I stopped to watch a little boy play in front of the display. I was intrigued and wanted to find out more about who’d created this.”

Antenna’s collaboration with Knoll aimed to create a flexible, affordable, attractive furniture system that could accommodate shifting flows of people and data in the contemporary workplace. Two years of research generated many ideas but no unifying theme or aesthetic. “We understood this was a postpanel, postcubicle world, so we started out with the data- and power-distribution scheme.” Udagawa says. “But all we ended up creating was a monster.”

After a few months of reflection, they returned with a new strategy. “We’d always worked to align our designs with our clients’ expectation,” says Udagawa, noting that unlike most of their previous work, which was fee based, he and Moeslinger have a royalty agreement with Knoll. “But we decided we first needed to make something we really liked. It wasn’t enough to just listen, to accommodate all these different voices. We needed something simple, something elegant. So we started where an office should start: with the desk.”

The bones of Antenna Workspaces are light, hyperstrong steel—a tubular skeleton that gives form and strength to the system. Broad, freestanding desktops of wood, laminate, or glass perch on one-inch-square legs, which are buttressed by a diamond-shaped steel rail running between them. The system offers several different configurations, including a series of linked desks that can be highlighted with different colors or materials. A die-cast, V-shaped aluminum cradle fastens the steel skeleton beneath the desktop to the steel legs. The whole structural scheme—slight but unexpectedly strong—was inspired by the U-shaped struts Udagawa observed atop the concrete columns that support highways.

From Florence Knoll on, most workplace design has been architecturally driven. Antenna flipped that on its head and worked from the inside out, delivering an industrial-design solution for a largely architectural problem. “This is one of the advantages of working with designers from other fields,” Pardo says. “They aren’t burdened by specific experience and can come up with new ideas. I also enjoyed the cultural mix—this American company founded by Germans and designers from Austria and Japan. The push and pull ultimately produced a novel conception of space and a product very much in line with Knoll.”

For Antenna, the Knoll project was a shift. Designing a static office system posed different challenges from channeling human and digital tides. “There are distinctions,” Moeslinger says, switching off her laptop. “But every design project involves motion—even the design of a stationary object, because that object will have to move through time.”