As we all know, the key to reading is learning your ABC. Once you've learned the letters, and combined them in simple words, you can approach more complex words, then sentences, paragraphs, essays and finally let that which you read discourse with your observations and experiences to help you better develop your understandings and appreciations of the world around us and those with whom we share it. But can learning the ABC of a designer help us to better approach understandings and
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"One day in the midst of a burning July, When meadows were parched and the rivulets dry, A cluster of Bees in extreme....... anticipation, Flew towards...... a design exhibition"1 (With apologies to Sara Coleridge) Our five welcoming, stimulating, retreats for bees, or anyone or anything, from the parching burning of July 2022 can be found in Munich, Metz, Tulsa, Vienna and Bordeaux....... "The Olympic City of Munich. Retrospect and Outlook" at the Architekturmuseum der TU München, Germany
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"Reinforced concrete is the best constructional material yet devised by mankind", enthused the Italian civil engineer Pier Luigi Nervi in 1956.1 A position Nervi spent a circa sixty year career arguing for, both in innumerable texts and through a canon of varied, and varyingly challenging, constructions throughout Italy, and much further afield. And in doing so Pier Luigi Nervi not only helped advance a popular acceptance of reinforced concrete as a construction material, but also helped
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Monographic exhibitions portraying designers from ages past, generally, only leave you with but little opportunity to directly assess, compare and contrast that designer in context of their time. The, desired, concentrated focus on the protagonist leaving you, by necessity, not least by necessity of limits of time and space, primarily relying on those snippets of information and/or blurry images of objects, invariably popularly celebrated objects, your brain can recover in that moment, for any
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Knoll A Wilhelm; A Walter; A Willy; A Hans; A Florence; A Lineage Although research into its ancestry is still very much ongoing, the wild Knoll, Knoll furniturus, is popularly believed to have originated in the region of the contemporary Stuttgart; what is certain is that it was in the contemporary Stuttgart that Knoll furniturus was first domesticated as Knoll wilhelmus, a Knoll typified by its leathery character and whose most successful cultivation was unquestionably in conjunction with
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With the Boötids, the Arietids and the Beta Taurids June is an eventful month for meteor showers; and a month of great promise for all those who hope their most earnest wishes for the future will be fulfilled through entrusting them to a shooting star. If only their wasn't the seemingly endless wait for nightfall, the seemingly endless sitting and streaming and snacking and stupor of waiting....... Alternatively, use the day(s) ahead of the arrival of those celestial messengers of hope in
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"It is possible to live without taking colours in daily life seriously just as it is possible to live and to ignore music, sculpture and other arts" opines the textile designer Bernat Klein in his 1965 book Eye for Colour, and thereby not only freely equating colour with other cultural goods but also very neatly setting up the refutal, "no one will doubt, however, that life will be fuller and richer if colours are daily absorbed, handled and savoured as they can and should be".1 Eye for Colour
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There is an argument to be made that the craft of the glassmaker is as anachronistic in the 21st century as that of the candlemaker: an argument that while the later has seen their craft superseded by the electric lightbulb, the function of the former has not only been increasingly marginalised by the rise of industrially produced glassware, but also by the development of new materials, materials more robust and more durable than the famously fragile and transient glass. The candlemaker and
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Following smow Turin's thoroughly unexpected, if in no way undeserved, victory in the 2021 smow Song Contest, it's off to Piemonte for the 2022 edition. A 2022 smow Song Contest being held very much in context of events 20 years previous....... 2002 was a very different world than the one we know today. In 2002, for example, following the ousting of the Taliban girls were allowed to attend school in Afghanistan; Chechens stormed the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow demanding an end to Russia's
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"The May of life blooms but once", reflects Friedrich Schiller, continuing, "It has faded for me".1 Cheer up Freddie!!! And there's nothing quite like a good architecture or design exhibition to revitalise all your faculties. Our recommended fertilizers for the zest of life in May 2022 can be found in Berlin, Den Haag, Brussels, Pfäffikon SZ and Amsterdam....... "Organizing Things" at the Werkbundarchiv - Museum der Dinge, Berlin, Germany According to Rudolf Clausius's interpretation of
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"Green is beautiful" proclaims an anonymous youth, an anonymous youth blind since birth, from Sophie Calle's 1986 photography project The Blind, "because every time I like something, I'm told it's green. Grass is green, trees, leaves, nature too... I like to dress in green". An indication, a confirmation, that even for those who have never seen colour, colour can awaken associations, stir emotions, have agency on the human being. With the exhibition Color as Program. Part One the
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"Everything is sculpture" opined once Isamu Noguchi.1 But is it? The exhibtion Isamu Noguchi in the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, allows one to engage with, reflect on, immerse yourself in Isamu Noguchi's life and work, and thus to better approach your own opinion on Isamu Noguchi's firmly held conviction..... Isamu Noguchi, Museum Ludwig, Cologne Born in Los Angeles, California, on November 17th 1904 to an American mother and a Japanese father we've discussed the Noguchi2 biography on
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Jongerius A Hella; A Lab; An Open-ended exploration As the ancient scribe Oranje Tulpenbol of Old Amsterdam records in his letters to the Rotter Dam aan Maas, the contemporary Jongerius is largely a consequence of the contributions of a Jongerian universally known as Hella on account of the brightness and lucidity of her Jongerius, a luminescence and clarity which was key in enabling Jongerius rise from its native home amongst the peoples of the Netherlands and to disseminate freely across
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As here in the northern hemisphere winter cedes to spring, not only is nature once again reawakening from its long repose but so too is the international museum community; and that, one senses, with more vigour than in the most recent springs where the Covid pandemic induced upsetting of the established order of the museal ecosystem, through both enforced closures and fundamental disruptions of essential exhibition development processes, dimmed somewhat the promise of the annual spring blush.
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In 1997 Euro-popsters Aqua declared that "life in plastic, it's fantastic". And in 1997 a greater part of humanity would have readily, and unquestioningly, concurred with Aqua that plastic was indeed fantastic. And that plastics offered us an endlessly fantastic, undimmably bright, future.1 But that was 1997. Last century. An eternity ago. And, as so oft, the passage of time has shaken once firmly held convictions and forced fundamental re-appraisals of all that which once seemed so
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In December 1969 the Austrian TV station ORF broadcast a half-hour portrait of the architect Hans Hollein, including a presentation of Hollein's Mobile Office project: essentially an inflatable plastic bubble in which one person could sit and work. "Klingt vielleicht etwas verrückt", mused the presenter, "sounds perhaps a bit crazy". And in 1969 a device, a construct, that allowed for the creation of a private domain in the midst of a public space, unquestionably did sound "etwas verrückt".
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With spring approaching thoughts invariably turn to days spent out of doors, and, for those fortunate enough, to thoughts of leisurely days spent sat in the garden. Leisurely days spent sat in the garden, ideally, listening to music. ¿Listening to music about being sat in the garden; sat in the garden listening to songs about garden furniture......? The (hi)story of garden furniture is, inarguably, and somewhat logically, as old as the garden itself; a concept that stretches back to the
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"Dear Architect" wrote Maria Chinaglia Ponti in 1967 to the architect, but no relation, Gio Ponti, "why don't you design us some modern furniture? Daddy Walter is worried because our traditional stuff is not selling as it used to".1 An unsolicited request, from a company of whom he'd never heard, an architect of the status of a late 1960s Gio Ponti could have turned down, it wasn't as if a late 1960s Gio Ponti needed the commission; however, something about the letter from Maria Chinaglia
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With furniture, as with so much in life, it is rarely the showy, high profile, works, or individuals, that teach us most, but those works, and those individuals, who in their anonymity and modesty accompany us in invisible silence. Or rather the anonymous and quiet could teach us most, if we spent less time being distracted by, letting ourselves willingly be distracted by, the noise of the showy. With the project Monobloc author and director Hauke Wendler, and a team of co-collaborators,
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"It was one of those March days" reflects Philip "Pip" Pirrip in Great Expectations, "when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade".1 And thus exactly the sort of dithering, indecisive, capricious, March day when rather than surreptitiously rowing down the Thames towards Gravesend, one should seek refuge in the consistent climate and warming intellectual atmosphere of an architecture or design exhibition. Our five Great exhibition
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Each and everyone of us sits innumerable times each and every day in a wide variety of contexts, yet we rarely, if ever, consider the act of sitting. The exhibition Sitting reconsidered. Design, Observe, Stage at the Burg Galerie, Halle challenges us all to do just that....... MRS1 & MRS1 Low by Luis-Konstantin Schlicht, and uncredited student photographic works, as seen at Sitting reconsidered. Design, Observe, Stage, the Burg Galerie, Halle Originating in context of, and presented
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Italy A Peninsula; A Commonwealth; A Context Striding out into the Mediterranean Sea the contemporary commonwealth of Italy, for all its apparent unity, and for all its superficially stable, pastoral, political landscape, is very much a volatile, fervid synthesis of innumerable independent Stati and Popoli; independent Stati and Popoli whose individual characters and perspectives helped form not only the contemporary Italy, but together define the (hi)story of furniture design in the
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"...one only finds warmth of life and sincerity where human nature is allowed to flourish", opined the German designer Erich Dieckmann in 1931, "one shouldn't forget that in our apartments. Let's treat our contemporary homes to something humane. Something unelaborate, something provisional, with some leeway and space for things to grow as they wish over time."1 With the exhibition Chairs: Dieckmann! The Forgotten Bauhäusler Erich Dieckmann, the Kunststiftung des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt and
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We were obviously off ill on the day of the great global public debate about whether, given the myriad problems of contemporary societies, our resource emergencies, and the effortless manner in which we've managed to turn the Internet, the greatest tool ever placed at the disposal of a member of the Animalia, into a platform for hate and vanity and greed and crime; if given all that, if we all wanted to, if we all should, move to the Metaverse. But that debate must have occurred, for the
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