The 2024 edition of Orgatec Cologne, Europe's, possibly the world's, largest trade fair for office furniture and office design is being staged under the banner "New Visions of Work". And as that 2024 edition, and its new visions, approaches a report is published in the International Journal of Epidemiology that should provide for some animated discussions at the event: Standing to work at a desk may not be as good for you as you may have been told. And could even be problematic. But there is
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Much as with the narrator of Half Man Half Biscuit's 'I was a teenage armchair Honvéd fan' we've also long "dreamt about a love affair in far-off Budapest". Unlike said narrator however our ongoing yearning doesn't revolve around a football club in the Kispest district of the city whose black an red was once worn by the likes of Grosics Gyula, Kocsis Sándor, Bozsik József or Puskás Ferenc, but revolve around design. Nor are we hankering after a golden age of either Hungarian football or
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"J'ai toujours aimé l'architecture. Plus que tout" reflected Eileen Gray in 1973, 'I've always loved architecture. More than anything", continuing, 'but I didn't think I was capable of it'.1 A capability her first major project, the villa E.1027 at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on France's Côte d’Azur, tended and tends to underscore she needn't have doubted. If a capability that over the decades has oft been as concealed and inaccessible as E.1027. With the film E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by
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Breaking the Glass Ceiling by Tina Marković and Karla Bastalić, as seen at Zagreb Design Week 2024 As previously noted, the theme of Zagreb Design Week 2024 was Breaking the Glass Ceiling, a theme that the organisers neatly, and pleasingly, expanded away from its conventional understanding in terms of gender parity and towards a demand for a design practice and design industry, or perhaps more accurately, a demand for a design practice and design industry in Europe, more inclusive that that
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The Paradox of Isoëtes. Future of Almost Lost Species by Adam Kvaček, as seen at Designblok Prague 2024 Presented in context of the 2024 Designblok Diploma Selection competition, it's difficult for us to discuss Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, UMPRUM, graduate Adam Kvaček's project The Paradox of Isoëtes. Future of Almost Lost Species in all too great detail as that involves reading a thesis we've not seen. But a thesis that having seen The Paradox of Isoëtes at
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Olimp by Studio Raketa, as seen at Zagreb Design Week 2024 In context of critical reflections on the Bauhauses, reflections also intended to draw a distinction between the Bauhauses and the HfG Ulm, to explain that the HfG Ulm wasn't simply a post 1939-45 War continuation of the Bauhauses, Otl Aicher once asked, "is design an applied art, does it appear in the elements square, triangle and circle, or is it a discipline that draws its criteria from the task, from use, from production and
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Dreamer's Garden by Linda Procházka and Jive Lau, as seen at Designblok Prague 2024 For all that gardens, be they small private gardens or expansive public gardens are often considered as refuges of nature, as small islands of nature amid the brutality of modern society, all gardens are artificial constructions. Even the Garden of Eden was, if one so will, an artificial construction. Gardens exist as extensions of the human imagination, creativity, desires, ideals. They aren't natural.
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My Daughter's Room by Josef Tomšej, as seen at Designblok Prague 2024 (it's a video wall in the background, loved the concept, didn't make photographing it any easier. But still loved the concept) There is a much posed question in terms of chairs as to if we need ever more chairs. The answer is, we do. We certainly do; but, and as opined from A Chair and You at the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig, we all do. Similarly, at each and every design week or furniture fair we invariably
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Two Hundred Tons, as seen at Designblok Prague 2024 It's more or less a century since the first steel tube furniture was developed, and looking around you it's relatively easy to believe that since then everything has been done, that steel tube furniture has reached its full potential. Or perhaps more accurately; because the contemporary popular understanding of steel tube furniture is the steel tube furniture from the earliest days of steel tube furniture, and because the steel tube
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Last time we were at Designblok Prague the roof blew of the venue. Not our fault (this time); but the consequence of an enormous, monstrous in every sense of the word, hurricane that blew across central Europe, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake that meant it took us, if we recall correctly, about 15 weeks to get home. And that via one of the more adventurous and improbable routes we've ever travelled. On the plus side we spent so long in Prague Central Station listening to
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Excito by Tea Gluvačević, as seen at Zagreb Design Week 2024 We're not sure how things are today in pre-school and primary education institutes, but when we were young every child regularly made a lantern by cutting some slits in a piece of paper, rolling it to a tube, and then squashing it a little. Which is a very simple, and slightly derogatory, certainly unfair, manner via which to describe the lamp, lantern, Excito by Sarajevo Academy of Fine Arts' student Tea Gluvačević. For not only
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Despite what you may have have been led to believe, Oktoberfest isn't in October. Or is barely in October. It's primarily in September, ends on the first Sunday in October. Meaning in 2024 it's all over on the 6th of October. Leaving you the rest of the month to over-consume in reasonably-priced architecture and design museums rather than over-consuming in over-priced beer tents. Our five locations for a party of the spirit, intellect, soul and for improving your understanding of the world
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Aalto by Jasna Faginović, as seen at Zagreb Design Week 2024 Back in the day sofas, as with all other furniture objects, were solid, immutable, unresponsive objects. Were what they were and remained that for infinity, regardless of how everything else around them changed. Then the human species discovered modularity. A moment as important, and as fundamental, for the human species as the discovery of fire, the wheel, or the potato chip. And since when sofas have been modular. Except they
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Kućni Bench by Lana Veble, as seen at Zagreb Design Week 2024 One of the (great many) consequences of our contemporary European society is the physical toll all the sitting takes on our bodies; a cost for our contemporary conveniences that means for ever more of us regular physical exercise is important, necessary, be that organised sport or simply a few exercises, stretches and bends at home. But much as nobody wants a home-office desk in their home that screams OFFICE at you, so to does
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The European design calendar is dominated by a few mega events, colossi whose shadows not only define the calendar but tend to hog the media and therefore the popular perception of contemporary design, not least since that media became primarily the unreflective echo chamber of Instagram; yet colossi whose (invariably stupidly high) costs mean that only those with the deepest of pockets can hope to find success at such events, only those with the deepest of pockets can hope to register on the
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"Das Unbehagen an unseren Städten ist ziemlich allgemein"1 opined the German architecture and design theoretician Hans Eckstein in 1972, 'discontent with our cities is fairly universal', continuing 'it is growing day by day. Accusations and indignation are heard everywhere. It is almost impossible to ignore the amount of literature about the miserable condition of our cities.' Yet despite the apparent, certainly for Eckstein, urgency and ubiquity of the discontent, he laments that 'there are
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In 1991 the German, designer, theoretician, educator and co-initiator of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, Otl Aicher, opined that "die Relation von Form und Material lässt sich nirgendwo so gut nachweisen wie bei Nahrungsmitteln, also etwa bei Teigwaren"1, 'the relationship between form and material is nowhere better demonstrated than in foodstuffs, such as pasta'. With the exhibition al dente: Pasta & Design the HfG-Archiv, Ulm, explore not only the relationships between form and material
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The word on the wind was that Tsuyoshi Tane’s Garden House was to be the last addition to the Vitra Campus, Weil am Rhein. The wind appears to have been ill-informed, thankfully, for with the project Khudi Bari by Marina Tabassum the Vitra Campus has a new addition that expands and extends it more than just physically....... Khudi Bari by Marina Tabassum, Vitra Campus, Weil am Rhein Developed in 2020 by Dhaka, Bangladesh, born and based architect Marina Tabassum as a project for "the
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Across the northern hemisphere September generally marks the start of the academic year, be that in primary, secondary, tertiary or quaternary education contexts, as students at all levels return to their studies after the long summer break. And while quinary education may not need an official start, or indeed a structured year, there is not only something appropriate in opening a new chapter in your studies alongside that of your fellow students, but for all the number and variety of new
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Timon and Melchior Grau with their Fire lamp (photo courtesy GRAU) There is an argument to be made, one indeed we've often have made in these dispatches, that the (hi)story of human society, essentially, begins with the harnessing of fire, a harnessing that conceptually someone had to arrive at and which poses important questions as to how 'primitive' 'primitive' societies actually were: could you conceive harnessing fire, and then work out how to? We couldn't. A harnessing of fire that was
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In 1998 the then, German President, and native of Bavaria, Roman Herzog opined, "In München sind Lederhose und Laptop eine Symbiose eingegangen", 'In Munich, lederhose and laptops have entered into a symbiosis'. One of innumerable partisan puffs for the Freistaat over the decades by Bavarian politicians; but also a very neat political statement implying that the popular image of Bavaria as being all about mountains, forests, lakes, rivers and rugged herders on livestock dense alms, was no
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"A bútortörténet az általános művészettörténet és a művelődéstörténet egyik speciális ága" opined the Hungarian interior designer, furniture designer, editor and educator Kaesz Gyula in 1962, 'furniture history is a special branch of general art history and cultural history', continuing that 'its task is to acquaint you with the part of human creative work that creates the human environment and means of use. Through the individual objects, we get to know the age, the production and social
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In the exhibtion A Chair and You at the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig, there is more than A Chair and You can look at them, study them, explore them, converse with them. But not sit on them. In the presentation Stühle zum (Be)Sitzen on the first floor landing of the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig, there is more than A Chair and You can look at them, study them, explore them, converse with them. And sit on them. Thirteen chairs which unite more than just thirteen
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Human society's fascination with leaving behind the limitations and fragilities and vagaries of the human being, and of the planet we all call home, is almost as old as human society, and is inextricably linked with developments in technology, science, engineering and human society's understandings of itself and its environments; amongst the earliest descriptions, for example, of flying to the moon being Francis Godwin’s 1638 book The Man in the Moone, an account of a journey, and of the beings
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