As we regularly note in our #campustour posts, what students produce is largely irrelevant, alone important in how the student got there, including how they responded to a given brief, posed their initial question, the logic in the decisions they made, the lessons learned from their mistakes, the lessons learned from others, the impulses received from contemporary discourses, etc, and how through the course of all such their understanding of and relationship to design evolved...... The Münster
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Everything should be Ecodesign, opines the tag line to MAD Brussels' exhibition Buy Now, Pay Later. And while we are, arguably, (at least a little) further advanced in terms of ecological, sustainable, design thinking than we were a generation ago, we still have a long way to go. Buy Now, Pay Later highlights some of the areas where we could do better....... Buy Now, Pay Later. Everything should be Ecodesign at MAD Brussels In 1972 the Club or Rome report "Limits of Growth", warned that
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The advantage the autumn edition of Maison et Objet has over the spring edition is Paris Design Week, a chance to not only explore French creativity in a wider context than can be found in the trade fair halls, but also to explore the French capital without the distraction of the city's history. A central component of Paris Design Week is Le Off, a platform for young designers and which for its 2018 edition was based in the Ground Control event and creative centre, tucked away behind Gare du
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We doubt we will be able to visit the 2019 Summaery exhibition at Bauhaus University Weimar, as we suspect the town will be too full of visitors celebrating the centenary of Bauhaus Weimar. Or perhaps better put, full of confused visitors wondering where all the steel tube furniture is..... Wrong Bauhaus people. Consequently we attempted to extract as much as we could from Summaery 2018. Bauhaus University Weimar @ Summaery 2018 Bauhaus University Weimar Summaery 2018 Although the
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The biggest disappointment at Maison et Objet Autumn 2018 was that Announcement Lady wasn't broadcasting across the halls, and so this year there was no continual "Mesdames, Messieurs", and so we had no continual Sash soundtrack to carry us though our visit. We just hope Announcement Lady's absence wasn't on account of us, we hope she didn't quit because she felt we were mocking her, being cheeky, or otherwise making fun of her. We weren't. It was genuinely one of our highlights at Maison et
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While for most locations a design week is sufficient, Brussels takes a whole month. We've never asked why, just assume it is because in the bi-lingual Franco-Dutch city where everything has to be repeated twice, thrice when one considers the more or less obligatory English required for the large diplomatic community in the de facto European capital, everyone is just used to things taking a little longer and plan accordingly. Whatever the reason, throughout September Brussels is playing host to
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Having made his way to America as a stowaway on an British freighter the Dutch abstract expressionist artist, and eponym of Rotterdam's art school, Willem de Kooning, initially made his living as a painter and decorator. Which, considered in context of his later work, is just the most delicious thought...... "No Willem, that wall ONLY green, that wall ONLY yellow, the doors ONLY white. And straight edges!!!" Willem de Kooning Academy & Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam Willem de Kooning
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On the train to Cologne the signs were unmissable, the sun may have been gloriously, victoriously, shinning, as it has done since Easter, from a clear azure sky: but autumn is definitely approaching. And while it may be a bit premature to start planning for next summer, at the annual spoga+gafa garden, freetime and equestrianism trade fair in Cologne, manufacturers presented what they expect us to sit on next summer in our gardens, on our balconies, while camping, the accessories they expect us
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That unfamiliar bouquet in the air in Karlsruhe is the wind of change blowing through the Hochschule für Gestaltung: having guided, nurtured and, one assumes, wisely counselled, the design department since 1994 as Professor for Product Design Volker Albus is departing. What that all means for the future is anyone's guess, it's very much a case of watch this space; for now all we could do is to what we do whenever a wind of change blows, and follow the Moskva down to Gorky Park and then on to
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According to Germanic lore, "ein guter Septemberregen kommt nie ungelegen", a good rain in September is never inopportune. This year arguably more so than ever. Similarly a good architecture and design exhibition in September is never inopportune. And, and keeping with rain metaphors, while we can all remember what rain is, September 2018, sees a proper downpour of new architecture and design exhibitions. A downpour that is particularly opportune. Following July's drought and its meagre 4
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Derived from the French parcourir, the parcours is perhaps historically most popularly associated with equine show-jumping, the challenge of negotiating an artificial obstacle course; more recently it has become popular in context of human show-jumping, the challenge of negotiating an urban obstacle course. Approaching the Köln International School of Design 2018 KISDparcours semester and graduation exhibition we hoped the obstacles to be negotiated would be of the mental, philosophical,
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Multi-storey car parks are many things to many people. For skateboarders a playground, for love-torn teens a place of privacy, for authors and film-makers an all too easy metaphor, and for yet others ..... somewhere to park their car. For the German architect Paul Schneider-Esleben the multi-storey car park represents his career breakthrough. And one of his most defining projects. Lichtplatz Car Park (Hanielgarage), Düsseldorf by Paul Schneider-Esleben Paul Schneider-Esleben Born in
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If, as we all freely accept, the meaning of life is 42, what does that make 43? A miscalculation, and a life led in the belief that it was correct, all for the best, but was in actual fact all very wrong and completely missing the point? A self-deluding over-estimation of the value of one's own contribution to society? Biting off more than you can chew? Superfluous? Such, and other, considerations have kept us busy since the the 2018 smow blog #campustour formally ended....... A falafel.
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Counting amongst its alumni the likes of Finn Juhl, Arne Jacobsen, Nanna Ditzel, Kaare Klint, Georg Jensen, do stop us if we get boring, Verner Panton, Thorvald Bindesbøll, Ole Wanscher, Poul Kjærholm, and pretty much any other Danish designer or architect of whom you've ever heard, and a great many more of whom you haven't, the Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi Copenhagen was formally inaugurated on March 31st 1754 in honour of the 31st birthday of Frederik V. But is it a gift that keeps on
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Odd as it may be to consider today, in the course of the 19th century and throughout the first decades of the 20th century, the German town of Chemnitz was one of the most important locations in central Europe for heavy and mechanical engineering, and thereby an important motor on the highway from craft to industrial production, supplying as it did the machines, infrastructure and ideas to enable that transfer. The importance of Chemnitz in the 19th century can perhaps be best gauged by the
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We've spent so much time walking alongside canals on this #campustour we've started to feel less like dashing thoroughbreds and more like plodding, monotonous, if honest, loyal and sedulous barge ponies. There are, as far as we are aware, no canals in Aachen, yet, and much like those city's who owe their existence to canals, Aachen owes its existence, and name, to its waters: the thermal springs arising in the city meaning that since Roman times the peoples of the region, and from further
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Approaching the 2018 Universität der Künste Berlin Rundgang one was obliged to navigate the weekly antique and flea market that overwhelms the Straße des 17. Juni, and thereby walk, hurry, past untold objects whose ill consideration, self-celebration, kitschiness or plain ugliness confuse, insult, anger and otherwise offend the senses and sensibilities. An inconvenience, or an omen for that which awaited us..........? Universität der Künste Berlin, Germany Universität der Künste Berlin With
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Systems bring order to chaos, allow relationships to be understood/defined, enable standardisation. And depend on a carefully considered, well designed and constructed connector. In 1939 the German architect Konrad Wachsmann developed a metal connector which subsequently became the central component of the General Panel prefabricated construction system developed by Wachsmann in cooperation with Walter Gropius. In 2018 the Bauhaus Lab reflected on that connector, Konrad Wachsmann and
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"It is a peculiar tension that precedes a first visit to a painting exhibition", opined the Dutch art critic Jacques van Santen Kolff in the introduction to his four part review of the 1875 exhibition at the Teeken-Akademie Den Haag, "there is a unique charm, something stimulating in that nervousness, an eminently "picturesque" tension."1 Kolff wasn't disappointed, that which he had sensed in the air was confirmed by that which hung on the walls and led him to coin the term "Hague School",
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Our visit to the 2017 Royal College of Art London Graduate Show was one of the more sobering moments of our 2017 #campustour. Or as we wrote then, "...in a world controlled by RCA graduates every, but every, aspect of our lives will be controlled by autonomous smart technology. We will literally lose the ability to think for ourselves. The human brain will become the appendix of the 21st century." Donning a hat fashioned from aluminium foil and an old metal sieve, we headed once more to South
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"Welcher Fehler braucht ein system?", "Which errors/mistakes/imperfections does a system require?", asked the Kunsthochschule Burg Giebichenstein Halle's 2018 annual exhibition. And used the question as a celebration of the power of trial and error, of the value, importance, poetry, of imperfections, abrasion, the incorrect, the unintended, the random, the well planned but ultimately unsuccessful, and how any otherwise well-organised, professional and targeted system needs a nuisance factor,
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As Katie Melua informs us "There are nine million bicycles in Beijing. That's a fact. It's a thing we can't deny" But why chose to highlight Beijing's nine million bicycles? Why not focus instead on a city such as Münster where there are a great many more bicycles than the paltry nine million Beijing has to offer? Maybe Katie wasn't convinced people would believe her, wouldn't be so willing to accept that that's a fact. It's a thing we can't deny. Which all has nothing in the slightest to do
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Writing to his friend Heinrich Köselitz in August 1881 Friedrich Nietzsche remarked, "My dear friend! The August sun hangs over us, the year drifts by, it is quieter and more peaceful on the mountains and in the forests. On my horizon thoughts have arisen, the likes of which I have never known...." We like to imagine that those thoughts arose through his having visited an architecture and/or design exhibition. Were he still with us, we'd suggest he visited the following vista extending
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Since 2000 Utrecht has been home to, when not the world's longest poem, then certainly the world's longest-term poem: running its way down Oudegracht through the heart of the inner-island, De Letters van Utrecht is extended every Saturday by the addition of a new letter, a process planned to continue ad infinitum. And which is in many ways similar to how smow blog posts are formed: we start writing, adding new words at regular intervals, without any real plan, far less any intention, ever to
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