Formations: Note Design Studio Builds a Totem Grove From Flooring for Tarkett

ART & CULTURE · MILAN

Reading time: 9 min

Note Design Studio clad twenty-four columns in Tarkett’s new iQ Surface for Milan Design Week 2019, turning a flooring launch into a room of totems under a glass roof. The studio’s real subject was the material’s working method: the hot-welded seam that normally disappears underfoot becomes, at full height, the ornament.

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Stockholm-based Note Design Studio unveiled Formations during Milan Design Week 2019, which ran from 9 to 14 April, inside the Circolo Filologico Milanese on via Clerici. The installation was built to introduce Tarkett’s new iQ Surface flooring collection, and it did so by refusing to show the material flat. Twenty-four columns, the tallest reaching five metres, rose through a double-height hall beneath the building’s glass roof, each one wrapped in the vinyl and topped with a cone, a ring, a cube or a sphere balanced at its summit.

Additional rooms through the building carried the idea further. Upstairs, in what was once the Circolo’s library, a long table held a field of smaller geometric forms, and the floor itself was laid in a grid pattern that let the material’s own weld lines show as decoration rather than hide them. Eero Aarnio’s Puppy, made for Magis, sat among tables, desks and screens finished in the same collection, and Konstantin Grcic’s Brut sofa for Magis furnished the spaces around them.

Formations was a product launch. It was also, on the evidence of the finished rooms, an argument about where a material’s working process belongs, and Note Design Studio pushed that argument as far as a flooring collection is ever likely to go.

A double-height hall turned into a totem grove

The scale of the installation is what visitors reported first. Twenty-four columns of varying height, round-ended and clad edge to edge in iQ Surface, stood across the Circolo’s central hall like a planted grove, lit by daylight falling through the glass ceiling above. The tallest reached five metres, tall enough that the geometric forms balanced at the top read against the room’s own architecture rather than against each other.

Those forms were deliberately basic: cones, rings, cubes and spheres, the vocabulary of a child’s building blocks rendered at furniture scale and dressed in the flooring’s own colourways. Note Design Studio has described the intention as sensory rather than didactic. Co-founder Cristiano Pigazzini said the aim was to “trigger emotions and create that gut punch,” working the tension between simplicity and complexity that runs through the studio’s wider output. Co-founder Johannes Karlström put the brief in more physical terms, saying the studio wanted visitors to “experience it with their own bodies, to walk through it and touch it.” Between them, those two statements describe an installation designed to be read at walking pace and close range, not from a single photograph.

Five colourways ran through the columns and the objects on top of them: Contrast, Rouge, Sober, Dimmed and Vivid, moving between muted reds, navy, cream, grey and a beige that ties the ranges together. The palette was Note Design Studio’s own work for the collection, built to hold its own next to natural stone rather than read as a synthetic substitute for it.

Note Design Studio, from Stockholm outward

Note Design Studio was founded in Stockholm in 2008 by Cristiano Pigazzini, Johannes Karlström and Susanna Wåhlin, and has since grown into a practice working across architecture, interiors, product design, graphic design and art direction, with a second base in Copenhagen. Its client list runs from Hermès and Herman Miller to Moooi, Kosta Boda and the Swedish furniture group &Tradition, and the studio has built a reputation for treating a brief’s constraints, whether a material, a manufacturing process or a brand history, as the starting point for a concept rather than a limitation to work around.

Formations sits inside that pattern. Rather than illustrate iQ Surface with sample boards or a showroom-style flooring bay, the studio built objects that only make sense once a viewer understands what the material is capable of: continuous, seamless coverage over compound curves, at a scale no flooring specification sheet can communicate. That decision, to demonstrate a technical property through sculpture rather than through a swatch, is the through-line in Note Design Studio’s exhibition work more broadly, and it is why a flooring brand commissioned a design studio rather than a stand-builder.

What iQ Surface actually is

iQ Surface is a homogeneous vinyl flooring collection manufactured by Tarkett at its factory in Ronneby, Sweden. Homogeneous vinyl differs from the more familiar luxury vinyl tile in that the pattern and colour run through the full thickness of the sheet rather than sitting in a printed top layer, which is why the material can be sanded, welded and formed without the design wearing through. iQ Surface is produced at a gauge of just 2mm, thin enough that Tarkett markets it as suitable for wrapping onto undulating and curved surfaces, not only for flat laying.

That thinness is the reason Formations was possible at all. A conventional commercial floor covering, thicker and stiffer, will crack or delaminate if pulled tight around a cylinder and dressed over a domed cap. At 2mm, iQ Surface can be heat-formed around a column shaft and its topper in a way a thicker product cannot, which means the totems in the Circolo’s hall were not a special fabrication trick performed on the material’s behalf. They were the material doing, at exhibition scale, exactly what it is specified to do on a real job: line a reception desk, wrap a curved wall, or dress a piece of joinery without a visible seam where the sheet turns a corner.

The collection contains 25 per cent recycled content and is assessed under Cradle to Cradle principles, and it is designed to re-enter Tarkett’s own supply chain at the end of its working life through the manufacturer’s ReStart take-back and recycling programme, which collects both installation offcuts and post-use homogeneous flooring, including material Tarkett has been recovering since 2011, and returns it to the production cycle rather than to landfill.

The weld line as ornament

The detail that ties Formations together is easy to miss in a photograph and impossible to miss in the room. Sheets of homogeneous vinyl are joined on site using a hot-air welding technique, in which a thin rod of matching or contrasting vinyl is melted into the seam between two pieces of flooring to make the join watertight. On a working floor, the fitter’s job is usually to keep that line as discreet as possible: colour-matched, ground flush, forgotten.

Formations did the opposite. In the upstairs room, where the collection’s grid-laid flooring demonstrated the range’s pattern combinations, the weld lines were run in a contrasting colour rather than a matching one, turning the seam into a visible line drawing across the floor. It is a small reversal, but it is the one that explains everything else in the installation: a totem pole built from a flooring material is only a curiosity until you notice that its maker has also taken the trade’s own construction technique, the part specifically designed not to be looked at, and put it on display as the finish. The columns show what iQ Surface can be shaped into. The welded floor upstairs shows how it is actually built, seam by seam, and treats that process as worth seeing rather than something to disguise.

Eero Aarnio’s Puppy and the Magis rooms

The rooms beyond the main hall carried a second, quieter story. Among the tables, desks and screens finished in iQ Surface, Eero Aarnio’s Puppy stood out as pure sculpture. Aarnio, the Finnish designer behind the Ball Chair (1963) and the Bubble Chair (1968), designed Puppy in 2004 for Magis’s Me Too collection, a rotomoulded polyethylene dog reduced to a handful of abstract, rounded volumes and produced in a range of sizes and finishes, from single bright colours to a spotted, Dalmatian-inspired coat. Its presence in Formations linked Aarnio’s own habit of working in reduced geometric forms, the sphere and the curve, to the cones, rings, cubes and spheres stacked on the columns next door.

Magis furnished the surrounding spaces, and among the pieces was Konstantin Grcic’s Brut sofa, first shown at Milan Design Week in 2017 and built as a direct reference to the industrial history of cast iron. Set inside a room dressed in a flooring collection engineered from recycled vinyl, Brut‘s own industrial reference gave the furnishing a second layer of relevance: both the sofa and the flooring around it were making an argument about materials usually associated with utility rather than design, asked to carry a design statement instead.

Circolo Filologico Milanese, a language society turned exhibition hall

The venue itself is one of Milan’s older cultural institutions, and an unusual home for a flooring launch. Founded in 1872 by Eugenio Torelli Viollier as a society for the study of foreign languages, the Circolo Filologico Milanese is the oldest cultural association in the city, holding a library of more than 100,000 volumes on via Clerici, a short walk from La Scala and the Duomo. Its rooms, ornate salons, wood-panelled libraries and a glass-roofed central hall, are still used for lectures, courses and cultural events well over a century after the society was founded.

For Milan Design Week, the building’s scale did the work that a purpose-built stand could not: a genuine double-height hall, real daylight, and a former library upstairs that could hold a second, quieter display of the same collection. Note Design Studio’s columns had room to be read from a distance and up close in the same visit, which is part of why the installation photographed and reported so consistently as a single, coherent room rather than a series of separate exhibits.

Final thoughts

It would be easy to describe Formations as a flooring brand borrowing the language of sculpture to make a launch more photogenic, and on the surface, twenty-four columns under a glass roof are exactly that kind of gesture. What the installation actually did was more specific. Note Design Studio took the two things a flooring collection is usually never asked to demonstrate, how thin the material can be worked and how its seams are actually made, and put both on display at a scale nobody visits a trade stand to see.

The columns prove the first point by existing at all: a 2mm homogeneous vinyl formed around a five-metre column and a domed cap without a visible break. The weld line upstairs proves the second, taking a fitter’s seam and running it in contrast rather than disguising it. Together they turn a material normally judged underfoot into one judged at eye level and at full height, inside a building whose own job for more than 150 years has been to hold rooms where people look closely at things.

That is the argument Formations actually made, and it is a stronger one than “a flooring brand exhibited at Milan Design Week.” Note Design Studio did not decorate iQ Surface. It explained it, one column at a time.