Molteni magazine | Design | Spring System

Spring System

Helen Gonzalez Brown for M Magazine, March 2025

STANDING DESKS HAVE A LONG AND ILLUSTRIOUS HISTORY: POLYMATH LEONARDO DA VINCI WAS RUMOURED TO HAVE USED THEM IN THE 15TH CENTURY, FOLLOWED BY THE LIKES OF CHARLES DICKENS, LEWIS CARROLL, ERNEST HEMINGWAY AND VIRGINIA WOOLF.

Early proponents commissioned high desks directly from carpenters, or used the taller shelves of bookcases, until manually adjustable sit-stand desks were invented that used hand cranks, pins, screws, or gas cylinders. UniFor’s latest workstation, however, the Spring System designed by architect Antonio Citterio, uses springs to manage the top movement. With their potential for increased productivity and creativity, as well as mounting research around potential health benefits, standing desks have often formed part of designers’ visions of the ideal workplace. When UniFor began its journey in 1969, furnishing the offices of the future was its raison d’être.

Spring System

The company released one of its first height-adjustable desks in 1986, which now exists in its modern form as the iSatelliti S200 workstation. When electronic desks that can rise vertically at the push of a button first became popularised in the 1980s, UniFor released Richard Sapper’s Secrétaire (1989), which was a play on the elaborate 18th-century writing desks that featured drawers, cabinets and cubby holes.

Spring System

La reinterpretazione di Sapper prevedeva un piano di lavoro regolabile in altezza e dotato di ruote per la massima mobilità. Il design manteneva l’eleganza nostalgica degli antichi secrétaire, con spazi dedicati a cancelleria, documenti e persino al fax. Il legno caldo e i profili arrotondati creavano un ponte tra estetica domestica e funzionalità da ufficio, anticipando la futura contaminazione tra casa e lavoro.Il nuovo Spring System di Antonio Citterio rappresenta un ulteriore passo avanti, rompendo con la tradizione della regolazione elettronica.

During the meeting with Carlo Molteni, they showed me the kinematics they had developed, and I immediately saw its potential.

Antonio Citterio

The new Spring System uses springs to counteract the weight of the desk as it rises. Users simply have to pull a lever underneath the desk to adjust its height, making it easy and intuitive to interact with, and removing the need for additional cables. “I asked if it could be integrated into a central column and sketched out an idea” Citterio says. While most modern standing desks feature thick legs with long, rectangular feet that span the width of the desk, Antonio Citterio’s system has slender, angled legs like a praying mantis. This is because the kinematics are all embedded in a horizontal beam at the centre of the desk, rather than inside the legs themselves.

Antonio Citterio is known for his timeless, elegant aesthetic and use of high quality materials, making him the perfect design partner for UniFor. In the single desk version, the structural element is anchored beneath raised flooring, nodding towards Citterio’s architectural background by smoothly embedding the furniture within a building. The system also offers meeting tables, and each of its components has been developed for easy assembly at the end of its lifecycle, allowing for responsible disposal and efficient material recovery.

This experience confirmed once again the value of a design dialogue – based on experimentation and direct exchange between design and engineering, an aspect I have always considered fundamental to my way of working.

This dialogue between different fields is also essential to the history of the standing desk. Interest in standing desks rose sharply in the 2000s, when James Levine, a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic, coined the infamous phrase “sitting is the new smoking,” and, in 2015, the Danish government even passed a law requiring employers to offer height-adjustable desks to protect workers’ health. The idea that a sedentary life can be dangerous has been around since at least 1797, however, when Presbyterian minister Jon Orton first recommended standing desks to avoid potential injury. While studies have linked an inactive lifestyle with chronic illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes, in 2021 Dylan Thompson, a professor of human physiology at Bath University, provided The Guardian with more nuance on the matter.

But a moderate level of physical activity can offset high levels of sitting.

Dylan Thompson

issue 18
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