USM NYC Central Lounge

Ben Ganz is the Swiss-born founder of Office Ben Ganz, a New York-based agency specializing in creative direction and object design. There’s a long tradition of the skyscraper and the skyline in furniture design — I’m thinking about Paul T. Frankl’s Skyscraper bookshelves from the 1920s, which used the skyscraper as a symbol of American modernity, or Gaetano Pesce’s iconic Tramanto a New York couch, which echoed 1980s Gotham. Given that USM’s origin is so directly connected to architecture, it made sense to me to continue this legacy. And the tower is a perfect symbol of New York — where the only place to build is up” — Ben Ganz