V-ZUG explores circular design at Zurich Design Weeks 2025 ​

Continuum brings together recycled composite foams, reconstituted textiles, and mechanical parts extracted from domestic appliances to form an assemblage that embodies circularity on all fronts. Inherited dimensions, surface traces, tolerances, and evidence of earlier use are not concealed but reconfigured into a new structural armature.

The foam elements, produced through a zero-waste process by Formtech, bind fragments of industrial production into new masses. Cut, slotted, stacked, or nested, they form alignments that are precise yet provisional. Nothing is sealed; every component can be dismantled, redistributed, and recombined - keeping form in a perpetual state of potential. 

Central to the installation are also repurposed stainless steel washing drums from V-ZUG appliances. Usually hidden inside machines, these sculptural forms are reimagined here as visible spatial modules—objects of durability and precision that now serve as seating, containers, or reflective surfaces.

Here, circularity does not begin with the afterlife of materials but at the act of design itself. Objects are conceived to be taken apart, redirected, and made anew. Details such as seams, joints, and tolerances are celebrated, carrying the same intentionality as in their first iteration.

The spatial experience resists hierarchy: repetition and variation create a shifting landscape where vertical and horizontal elements frame surfaces to touch, gaps to pass through, and alignments to observe. Visitors are invited to inhabit this terrain—seating, leaning surfaces, and traversable voids become both spatial and material atmospheres.

Fischbacher 1819’s recycled textiles enter their third or fourth material lifetime, stitched into composite membranes that register earlier uses and their recomposition logic. Mechanical housings, usually concealed, are revealed: operational logics, acoustic chambers, and structural tensions sit close to their functional thresholds.

Continuum embodies circularity not as a return to an origin, but as an open system—structural, practical, and future-oriented.