Koji Collection
By embracing nature’s example as inspiration for conceptual design, going green never looked so cool.
By Jeremy Lissek
Nature is not just a strong influence. It’s not just a pervasive manifestation. Nature, and more importantly, the concepts and principles it embodies, provides an inexhaustible source of inspiration, comfort, and example. At the Koji Collection, art and nature are indistinguishable, inspired by the Asian ideal of bringing nature indoors, and distilled into designs that consider humanity’s relationship with the surrounding world-captivating the imagination thoroughly and powerfully.
At the Miami-based Koji, the bounty of nature is quoted, adapted, and celebrated in streamlined shapes and organic twists-literally and figuratively. Lotus leaves. Ripples. Clovers. Turtles and olives, eagles and half oranges-they’re all wickedly interpreted into furniture and accessories. Koji provides ultra-modern, high-end pieces for those who want their living space to be a place where myth and dreams are set free to play. These pieces are not shadows of reality, but produce new existences and essences in their own right. From chairs to daybeds, tables to dog and cat cabins, Koji lyrically arranges elements and utilizes organically derived motifs to create an unprecedented design vocabulary. It reminds us how great design can make the mind sing.
It can also recreate and redirect the function of nature itself. Koji is one firm that doesn’t just preach the environment; it’s its entire reason for being. The core mission is to offer a hand-made collection from natural, easily renewable materials-nuisance vines like rattan, liana, and jute; the kind of vine that overgrows in the forest, chokes out the old and prevents new tree saplings from sprouting. Another type is water hyacinth, a vine that clogs up rivers and shallow waterways. By helping to control and repurpose these eco-hazards, Koji provides indoor and outdoor furniture that modern living, forward thinking, eco-conscious people can take pride in.
Some Koji pieces have an overt geometry; some are somewhat softer. Yet no matter the specially selected motif, there is always a consistency that speaks of an organizing intellect of detail intended to symbolize the essential character of habitats, objects, and organisms. The Koji imagination is boundless: the Amazon, shells, roots, fossils, caribou, abalone, jellyfish stools, bug day beds, bottle gourds, rolling stone hanging lamps. When you sit in an olive pit chair, you essentially become the pit. And Koji’s avant-garde vision extends beyond terra firma, into outer space. There are space crab chairs, as well as a wormhole table, called “Space-Time,” which is supported by so many paradigm-busting legs that it seems to stand on the great wall of the universe itself.
The chic confluence of subtle shapes and intelligent materials is why the hospitality industry and interior designers are already flipping out over the collection. It’s also why Koji Collection is the official collection of the 2009 Academy Awards. It will be creating Koji Collection luxury suites for celebs and V.I.P. guests at the Beverly Hilton Hotel during Oscar week.
I’m sure those A-listers will also experience what I did today, how when the whimsy of art meets the necessity, form, and function of craftsmanship, it can be a powerful vector for change. At lunch, as I was eating a salad, I stopped, stared at, and picked up a green olive. I had never looked at it in quite the same way before, and never will again.
News
November 26, 2008A List Aviation: Miami Executive Aviation
