Over the last four years, WØRKS co-founder Haris Fazlani has been designing furniture. Not necessarily with overtly commercial intentions, but more as a meditative art practice that expands beyond our traditional working disciplines. “For me, feels like a natural extension of my fascination with sculpture, a way to create functional art that counterbalances the intangibility of screen-based work,” he says.
“There’s a profound comfort in making something tactile, analog, rooted in the physical world.” From the visual precariousness of the Italic Chair to the appreciation of shadows of the Level Workstation, each piece seeks to do convey the purity of a single artistic idea while remaining entirely functional.
The concept for The Shelf Daybed began as an off-the-cuff musing by Vincent Van Duysen about the ability for books to be the “protagonists” of a space. The intentionality of living in a simple, serene space, with everything hidden but books — art objects in their own right — gave birth to the Shelf Daybed, a modular daybed with space to exalt a selection of books.
The Level Table, designed specifically for the WØRKS office is named aptly not only because of its resemblance to a level tool, but because of its use as a tool for work itself. The voids create opportunities for and acknowledge the “thingness” of light. These light and shadow interactions invite us to place the table not directly against a wall, but rather with some space around it. In a way, the object has an opinion on its own placement in a space.
The affectionately named Italic Chair, inspired by the illusory danger of Brancusi sculptures, is a chair tilted at 12 degrees. It focuses quietly on this simple idea, showing no other visible features, and no joinery, and operates seamlessly as a stable, usable lounge chair.
Renders by Bryan Meador
Photography by David Zshu