Winner
Interior Innovation Award 2011

With the Interior Innovation Award 2011, Felix Schwake was honored at IMM Cologne by the German Design Council for a design that reinterpreted the relationship between function, order, and spatial atmosphere. The awarded project was the multimedia table SUMMARUM — a design that fully integrates technical infrastructure and everyday work processes into a reduced geometric form.

The design emerged from the observation that modern workplaces often fluctuate between two extremes: total organizational control or permanently visible disorder. Felix Schwake therefore did not develop a table that imposes order, but rather a spatial structure that allows controlled openness.

The multimedia table SUMMARUM fully integrates storage space, multimedia technology, and organizational functions into its construction. Extendable functional elements accommodate work materials, technical devices, and accessories while remaining immediately accessible at all times and capable of disappearing completely back into the clear geometry of the furniture when no longer needed.

Particularly essential to the concept was the idea that traces of use and everyday working processes should not be suppressed. The integrated pen compartment, for example, was deliberately conceived as an informal working zone — a place where materials may be used, collected, and temporarily deposited without disrupting the overall spatial order.

As a result, the reduced external appearance of the table remains intact even during everyday use. Technology and work equipment do not visually dominate the space, but instead become part of a precisely organized architectural structure.

The jury particularly acknowledged the combination of minimalist design and functional openness. The project exemplifies an approach that would later shape many of Felix Schwake’s works: design should not produce sterile perfection, but rather create spaces that connect concentration, calmness, and actual everyday use.

With the Interior Innovation Award 2011, Felix Schwake therefore received early international recognition for an approach that understands architecture, interior design, and functional art not as separate disciplines, but as parts of a coherent spatial order.