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FEDER
08/23/2011

Figueras – innovation as its career path and goal

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Sistema Mutaflex, Auditorio Alfredo Kraus, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

Sistema Mutaflex, Auditorio Alfredo Kraus, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

Sistema Mutaflex, Auditorio Alfredo Kraus, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

Sistema Mutaflex, Auditorio Alfredo Kraus, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

Sistema Mutaflex, Auditorio Alfredo Kraus, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

Sistema Mutaflex, Auditorio Alfredo Kraus, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

Asiento para salas consistema Mutaflex

Asiento para salas consistema Mutaflex

Autditorio de Queensland, Brisbane (Australia)

Autditorio de Queensland, Brisbane (Australia)

Centro Internacional de Convenciones de El Cairo (Egipto)

Centro Internacional de Convenciones de El Cairo (Egipto)

Sala XX de la ONU, Ginebra (Suiza)

Sala XX de la ONU, Ginebra (Suiza)

Aeropuerto Inernacional Sabiha Gökçen, Estambul (Turquía)

Aeropuerto Inernacional Sabiha Gökçen, Estambul (Turquía)

Edificio de Capital One, Virginia (EE.UU)

Edificio de Capital One, Virginia (EE.UU)

Espacio polivalente Madrid Arena, Madrid (España)

Espacio polivalente Madrid Arena, Madrid (España)

Sala de teatro en el resort Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai (EAU)

Sala de teatro en el resort Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai (EAU)

Cines Arca Multiplex, Pescara (Italia)

Cines Arca Multiplex, Pescara (Italia)

Parken Stadium, Copenhague (Dinamarca)

Parken Stadium, Copenhague (Dinamarca)

Sillas para tribunas telescópicas de accionamiento automático

Sillas para tribunas telescópicas de accionamiento automático

Showroom de Figueras en Colonia

Showroom de Figueras en Colonia

Showroom en Londres, recién inaugurado

Showroom en Londres, recién inaugurado

Even though they don’t grace our homes, we’ve all sat in them – in cinemas, theatres, at exhibitions, during concerts or at a lecture, in a football stadium, university or hotel. We’ve all definitely spent hours sitting on an armchair by Figueras, a Barcelona-based firm which has been designing chairs for public spaces for the past 82 years.

 

Today, the company is divided into three parts: Figueras International Seating, devoted to developing seating for public spaces; Figueras Design Center, where the company collaborates with architects to design the most appropriate design for each project (which the company calls ‘a designer armchair’), and Figueras Engineering & Consulting, which develops engineering projects for multifunctional rooms.

 

Eva Blanco de Alba, Figueras’s marketing director, thinks the cornerstone of the company’s success has been to keep one step ahead of developments in the sector and to innovate constantly in order to maximise its clients’ wellbeing. ‘It’s essential to listen to them,’ she says, ‘as they hold the keys to the future direction of the company.’

 

Figueras’s philosophy, with its focus on good design and innovation, can be summed up by its intention to make the most of a given space and – something that’s becoming increasingly important – make a space profitable. These principles have had a lot to do with Figueras’s spectacularly successful career. The company today is highly respected in the world of furniture for public spaces, having installed around 7.5 million chairs in buildings all over the world.

 

Technological revolution and personalised design
The higher cost of floor space and the low profitability of rooms used for only one purpose prompted the company’s engineering and consulting arm to dream up the Mutaflex system. This ground-breaking piece of equipment allows a room originally designed to be a lecture hall, theatre or auditorium to convert to an open-plan room where banquets, exhibitions and dances can all be held.

 

Simply by pressing a button, this system’s chairs move along tracks, and then are stored inside a stage that’s also moveable. The use of this system in over 300 projects around the world – such as Palais de la Mutualité in Paris the town hall of Jujurieux, in France, the corporate room of Samsung in Korea, Palau de la Música in Barcelona and, more recently, the main room of the North Campus building of financial company Edward Jones in Saint Louis, Missouri, USA, and the Alfredo Kraus auditorium in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria – attests to its massive popularity.

 

Taking a sketch, concept or idea as a starting point, designs are developed in the Figueras Design Centre, the company’s nerve centre. This centre collaborates with architects right from the start when developing a product. Together they analyse what kind of product is needed, taking into account the character of the space and the use it’s destined for, and present prototypes together.

 

According to Blanco de Alba, the current financial crisis has affected Figueras just as it has affected every business linked to the construction sector, but she stresses the decisive factor which will help overcome it: ‘Thanks to the big international presence we’ve had for over 30 years, we’ve been able to make up for markets in recession and increase our sales. The true crisis which now threatens small and medium-sized businesses is that of financial markets.’

 

Figueras is present in over 100 countries and has supplied over 4,000 premises all over the world. These include the press room of the White House in Washington DC, Yahoo’s auditorium in the US, Room XX at the UN in Geneva in Switzerland, the auditorium of Santa Croce near the Vatican, the parliament building of Tanzania and the recently opened El Molino disco in Barcelona.

 

Continuous expansion
Last April, Figueras opened a showroom in London with the aim of consolidating its presence in the UK, where it has supplied furniture to over 150 places. This 230m sq space is devoted to selling and displaying its goods and can also be used to host events, such as the introduction to the World Architecture Festival. This is the company’s eighth showroom; others are based in Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Cologne, Lisbon, Miami and Singapore.

 

For Blanco de Alba, two future Figueras projects stand out in particular: one that’s already been designed which will be installed at Cornell University, in New York, in September (a series of armchairs which can be stored in the technical floor of a room which can be arranged in different ways according to how it’s used as each armchair is free-standing) and furniture in the Scottish National Arena, a huge space destined to be used for concerts, designed by Foster & Partners. The armchairs were designed by the same architects and developed by Figueras’s design centre.

 

When we asked Blanco del Alba what she thought the future holds for Figueras, she replied that it would be rash to speculate, given the speed with which markets, companies and technology change. As she put it: ‘Who’d have thought 80 years ago that a local carpentry workshop would one day become a leading company in the manufacture of public seating? Even only 10 years ago, the idea that a hall full of armchairs could disappear at the touch of a button would have seemed science fiction.’

 

Whatever happens, she affirms that Figueras will carry on producing high-end products based firmly on innovation and good design – in exactly the same spirit as when the company was founded.

 

Features: seating for public spaces

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