European fruit-and-vegetable marketplaces are vital public spaces where not just coins and apples are exchanged but also politics, gossip, and community news. These markets, with their sheltering open-sided canopies, inspired Carl Gustav Magnusson in his design of a radically new type of office furniture.

His Marketplace table, created for Teknion, the Toronto-based office-furniture company, is aimed at collaborative work groups and for a new generation of office workers who were raised on mobile phones, laptops, and iPods and are eager to abandon their cubicles.

The huge Marketplace table was introduced in June at NeoCon, the annual office-furniture-industry show in Chicago, where it won a gold medal for best of show. Its rooflike canopy, a distinct echo of the traditional market, emotionally and symbolically defines its space and contains warm, soft lighting. In the common space, the lighting provides a sense of personal territory. "Space and place," Magnusson calls it.

"The common table goes back to medieval times," Magnusson says as he surveys his creation. "We are reinventing it for the 21st century."

The shared table works as both metaphor and means for the new way of working. "Work is much more collaborative today. People are multitasking. Marketplace helps bring people together to exchange ideas."