Office Party with Chris Kabel

(photocredits; JW Kaldenbach)
At the Salon/Paris presentation during The Grand Paris Design Festival, we bumped into to these very festive neon lights, designed by Chris Kabel. Mr Kabel created a device to cover the neon tubes with colorful, transparent garlands. When the Office Party is over you can just slide the garlands back! A nifty light design, Auch Haben!

Office Party 2014

Social events at the office can make you feel slightly schizophrenic. You’re surrounded by work but also tipsy from the numerous drinks that are indispensable to feel relaxed at such occasions. After a few glasses the work you have been doing so carefully all day suddenly loses its importance. The bleak neon light increases that ambiguous feeling. This strange contrast is the basis for the Office Party lamp. Office Party is conceived for Portikus, an art centre located in a very peculiar building on a small island in the river Main in Frankfurt.

Portikus came to me with an interesting request: they have an amazing office space that doubles as a location for openings and dinner parties but their fluorescent office lighting didn’t really add to the festive atmosphere. They asked me to reconsider their existing neon fixtures and come up with a simple and cheap solution. The neon tubes were lowered, allowing for a brightly colored transparent garland to slide along the tubes. While it slides along the tubes the garland transforms the harsh neon light into a merry mix of colors. Colors shift from blue to orange and from purple to yellow creating an unthought color mishmash. (copy/paste chris kabel)