Pretty flexible

“When we looked at the current state of the market, we were surprised to find that nothing like this existed yet,” says Marie Kurstjens as she taps one of LEVI’s legs in a friendly manner. LEVI is a table frame with crossed struts and a new addition to the collection of “ MAGAZIN ” products. The collaborative project by Marie Kurstjens and Iva Coskun achieves its aesthetic beauty through minimalism. The key feature isn’t immediately apparent—yet it’s the central element of the piece: the cross-braced frame has a hinge where the two rods meet. This means LEVI’s width and span can be adjusted to accommodate tabletops of various sizes. And when folded completely flat, it can even fit behind a door. LEVI was created in 2019. Kurstjens and Coskun studied product design at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. In their second semester, the theme was “Workplace.”

The question: What must a table be capable of when used in settings where configurations change—where things are taken apart, put together, or modified? The two quickly realized that while the university had nice desks, However, they offered little flexibility and could hardly be adapted to different work and presentation situations. “We quickly figured out the principle behind the joint,” says Coskun. Working in the workshops was the real hurdle. “Building the frame on a one-to-one scale required a lot of testing, adjusting, and optimizing. The principle was clear, but the design was developed and refined as we went along.” Added to this was the experience that young women are not always taken seriously in workshops, which presented additional challenges during the development process. That same year, Iva Coskun and Marie Kurstjens entered the “Pure Talents Contest” at the Cologne Furniture Fair.

The fact that they—the only all-female team and by far the youngest participants—emerged as the winners of the young designers’ competition still seems to genuinely surprise them today—and delight them. All the more so because the table frame is now going into production, albeit with a delay caused by the pandemic. For both of them, this is their first furniture design—but they take a broader view of design. Kurstjens focuses primarily on social design and was named “Newcomer of the Year” at this year’s German Design Award; for her master’s thesis at the Berlin University of the Arts, she developed “Designing Dignity,” a modular system for menstruating people seeking refuge. Coskun will soon complete her master’s degree, also at the Berlin University of the Arts. In her thesis “Ornaments of Care,” she examines the marginalization of ornamental practices. She advocates for the increased incorporation of ornamentation—which has a negative image in modern design discourse—back into product design.