Komplot Design | ScandinavianDesign.com

Komplot Design is a Copenhagen design studio founded in 1987 by the Danish architect Poul Christiansen and the Russian-born industrial designer Boris Berlin. The studio works across furniture, industrial and graphic design. It is known for chairs that make new materials and production methods look simple, including the rubber NON chair and the GUBI 3D Chair.

Background

Poul Christiansen, born in Copenhagen in 1947, graduated as an architect from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1973. He is also known for his folded lampshades for Le Klint. Boris Berlin, born in Leningrad in 1953, trained in industrial design in St. Petersburg and moved to Denmark in 1983. They set up Komplot as a partnership in 1987.

Design approach

Komplot’s work starts from a technology or a material rather than from a style. The studio tests what a production method can do and reduces the object to what is needed. The partners describe the NON chair as “the archetype of a chair, not a designed chair, just a chair”.

Key designs

NON, launched by Källemo in 2000, is a tubular steel frame with PUR rubber moulded onto it in a single shot. It works indoors and out. Metropolitan Home called it the “cleverest use of rubber since the eraser”, and the chair turned 25 in 2025.

The GUBI Chair from 2003 was the first industrial use of 3D veneer moulding. It became the first dining chair in the GUBI collection and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. GUBI reissued the collection in 2025 in recycled plastic and updated veneer.

The NOBODY chair for HAY is moulded from recycled PET felt with no frame at all. Other designs include the Collage tables, the Antilope chair, the Genus chair and the Grid armchair.

Recognition

In 2015 Komplot received the Thorvald Bindesbøll Medal from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Its chairs have won the Danish Design Prize, Red Dot Best of the Best, Best of NeoCon, the Forum AID Award and a German Design Award, and NON was named Furniture of the Year 2002. The studio’s work is held by MoMA, Designmuseum Danmark, Trapholt, the Röhsska Museum and Designmuseo in Helsinki.