360 CHAIR & STOOL / WORK CHAIR / MAGIS /
2009
360° is neither a stool nor a chair, but something inbetween. Its name implies that it swivels around and that one can sit on it in all directions. It is meant for seated activities that require a constantly changing posture. 360° is not intended for long stints of work in a static position. Instead it encourages a form of dynamic sitting, short term, ad hoc, improvised - moving around.

360° comes in two types, as a chair on castors and as a high stool. Both versions have a gas piston for height adjustment.

"Konstantin Grcic´s radical take on the office chair shatters the ergonomists´monopoly on workplace design and turns a bumrest into a tool. Sitting on it in a traditional way is the least successful approach - you feel a vertiginous sensation that everything that should be there isn´t. (…) In its efforts to shake off the flattened, generic experience of traditional office furniture, Grcic has made something that asks us to think of a chair-as-tool, or chair-as-device. (…) What´s happening here is a strange trick - where by undoing the direct functional performance of a chair, Grcic makes the 360° somehow more functional. By un-inventing the normative perception of the chair, he asks its user to be party to the imaginative invention of sitting. (…) And somehow this provisional quality feels like a relief from a more conventionally comfortable chair. Sitting on it here in my office, it feels less like work, more like doing something."
(Excerpt form a text by Sam Jacob published in ICON magazine, September 2009).

Project assistant: Jan Heinzelmann (KGID)
Producer: Magis