The award-winning C1 Credenza.
The C1 Credenza by Marcus Friesl has been awarded Gold by the A’ Design Award.
Marcus Friesl, who was born and raised in Toronto, Ont. has been working out of Los Angeles for years and recently started his own company – mf design group, a design and fabrication consultancy – there.
Designed by Friesl, the C1 Credenza uses a thin, folded metal shell to support both upper and lower drawers, combined with an embedded structural system in the drawer units that allows the piece to span the full seven feet without intermediate support, “allowing it to float elegantly in space.”
The C1 is built in Canada with the help of GSF Ltd., Mississauga, Ont., which is owned by Marcus’ father Nick Friesl and his partner Sukarnan Kirupalingam.
Friesl graduated from Ryerson University in 2000 with a Bachelors of Architectural Science. For the next five years he worked in architecture in both Sacramento and Toronto.
In 2005, he applied and was accepted to work towards his Masters of Architecture at the Southern California institute of Architecture (SCIARC) in Los Angeles. He graduated at the end of 2007.
In 2008, Friesl joined an international office based out of Berlin, but working in Los Angeles, and became lead designer on several international projects.
In 2010, Friesl consulted with GSF Ltd. on a project for the Museum of Moving Image (MOMI) in New York (search our archives and see our March 2011 edition for that story), and they are working together again right now. This time on a new, super high-end jewelry flagship store slated to open this fall in Manhattan. The project consists of a lot of double-curved fixtures that are fabricated in a variety of materials.
Friesl says, the family connections notwithstanding, working with GSF Ltd. is not something he actually ever planned for.
“But they have an exceptional and rare ability to work on projects that are highly complicated,” he says, “and they are willing to work in new ways and adjust their methods on every project.”
In fact, through their co-operation, they have earned something of a reputation as a team that can take on highly complicated work, in a variety of materials, delivering highly precise, high-quality, on-time projects.
“We compliment each others skill set quite well.”
And because of GSF’s ability to adapt and innovate, Friesl says the vast majority of fabrication for his projects is being done in Canada.
