"I wanted the staircase to be the centrepiece of the building. This creature undulates in the space, shaping and pervading it. This huge half-whale and half-snake chimera, snatches you, swallows you up and spits you out at the right floor,” sums up Ora ïto. An undoubtedly eye-catching parametric sculpture with a biomorphic structure, like a tornado in a mindfully serene office environment.
“The staircase surpasses the architecture. The offices are intentionally minimalist, calm and functional without extraneous decor. The refined details are unobtrusive. The only visual surprise for collaborators and visitors is this huge body that rises through the building and lends itself to various functions in several spaces: reception area, partitioning, canteen and auditorium walls.”
Ora ïto also designed the communal areas of the entire 10 Grenelle real-estate project, extending over more than 30,000m² and encompassing 30 levels including the unit dedicated to LVMH’s media division.
In 1997, Ora ïto hijacked top brands with his virtual Vuitton and Apple products that instantly became global icons of the digital revolution. A phenomenon in pop culture, he is the youngest designer of his generation to collaborate with jewels of luxury goods and industry, after the huge multi-acclaimed success of his aluminium Heineken bottle. Cassina, Cappellini, Bouygues, Alstom, Laguiole, Zanotta and Accor highly rate his sculptural design that has become a mark of modernity.
The multidisciplinary, transversal Ora ïto studio has since gone from telephone to architecture, from furniture to the hotel industry, from perfume to tramways and from flying saucers to restaurants, manipulating symbols to simplify them. A tenacious methodology for which he has invented a neologism: simplexity, decoding today’s DNA to conceptualise future mutations. His fluid vocabulary materialises movement reinventing streamlining in the digital era and giving shape to the desires of our contemporary society.