It goes without saying that picking a "best of" from an event such as Dutch Design Week is impossible. Too varied are the projects, too wide the scope, too incomparable the works be that classic product design, classic architecture, classic craft, or more conceptual and/or research projects in and across genres. Rarely does urban planning sit so comfortably and naturally alongside pottery, high-tech and politics. While everywhere in Eindhoven one finds people 3D printing with all manner of
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According to Axl Rose, "...it's hard to hold a candle, in the cold November rain." The question is surely, why you would want to? It sounds like a thoroughly foolish thing to do. The clocks have changed, it's dark, cold, we're all a little down, but honestly Axl, standing outside with candles ain't going to make things better. Visiting one of the following five new architecture and design exhibitions however might just.... Fear and Love – Reactions to a complex world at the Design Museum,
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We must start with a confession . This High Five! is a High Four! Not because there weren't good products on show at Orgatec Cologne 2016, there were. But much more Orgatec is an office furniture fair, and therefore: a) most manufacturers offer, in essence, the same range, it is all very homogeneous. Generally of very good quality, but otherwise uninspiring, all very generic, safe and overtly commercial. One reason is that in the contract, so wholesale, business, decisions as to which
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When we spoke with Vitra's Chief Sales Officer Josef Kaiser at NeoCon Chicago he told us that at "Orgatec 2016 we will be trying to be more interesting for architects, without losing the focus on the dealers, which will be challenge, but one we’re looking forward to, not least because this year we have our own hall" What that meant in practice could be experienced in Hall 5.2 at Cologne Messe. Or in the Vitra Messe - Vitra Trade Fair - as we've taking to calling it, seeing how it was,
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On the train down to Kortrijk and the 2016 Biennale Interieur we started drafting this introduction. The talk was of the 25th anniversary edition, the relevance of the event in context of the European furniture and design market - then and now - and the strength(s) of contemporary Belgian furniture design Then we saw that organisers were charging 50 cents to use the toilet. In a fair. Ctrl A. Ctrl X. It may "only" be 50 cents, but.... having charged visitors €22,00 to enter a fair. You
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"The fact that you are European allows you to be quirky. Europe has a great reputation for good design but that is just the ante to the game, and allows you then to be interesting, but you also have execute." BuzziJungle by Jonas Van Put for BuzziSpace, as seen at NeoCon Chicago 2016 Established in 2007 as a producer of office acoustic solutions, the Belgian manufacturer BuzziSpace has quickly grown to become not only one of the major producers of acoustic products but of what one could
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In 2016 the Breton capital Rennes hosted four exhibitions of, by and from Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec; one of them Rêveries Urbaines - Urban Dreams - is now on show at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec - Rêveries Urbaines, Vitra Design Museum In the European design calendar late September/early October is Vienna Design Week and the opening of the winter/spring temporary exhibition in the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein. And thus our annual outing on the
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The winners and nominated projects from the 2016 International Marianne Brandt Contest can be viewed in an exhibition in Chemnitz. International Marianne Brandt Contest 2016 Exhibition, Chemnitz Museum of Industry Time was we couldn't write about Chemnitz without making a cynical comment, an alleged joke. Time was. These days we not only travel voluntarily, and regularly, to Chemnitz but have begun to understand aspects of the town's character, aspects which on account of our previous
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Continuing our series of posts on creativity in Cologne, historic and contemporary, we met up with product designer Felix Stark. Born in Bonn Felix Stark initially completed a carpentry apprenticeship before studying product design at the ecosign/Akademie für Gestaltung in Cologne, where in 2004 he established his design studio "formstark". In addition to realising projects as varied as, and amongst many others, the ARK tap and bathroom fittings collection for Spanish manufacturer Stanza, a
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Understanding materials has helped contemporary society develop as it has. And remains as relevant today as ever. If not more so. Ergo material education is as relevant as ever. If not more so. Object Lessons. The Story of Material Education in 8 Chapters at the Werkbundarchiv - Museum der Dinge Berlin "We daily call a great many things by their names, without ever inquiring into their nature and properties; so that, in reality, it is only their names and the things themselves with which we
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O hushed October morning mild, Thy leaves have ripened to the fall; Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild* You'd be well advised to take yourself off to one of the following new architecture and design exhibitions....... (With apologies to Robert Frost) * Robert Frost - October (1913) "How Should We Live? Propositions for the Modern Interior" at the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, New York, USA Whereas lifestyle magazines and lifestyle blogs are very keen to tell us how we should live, architects
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Dessau and Rotterdam may appear unlikely brothers in arms; however, an exploration of the towns' architectural connections helps explain International Modernism. Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau present The Simultaneity of Modernism The Bauhaus School building by Walter Gropius in Dessau is, arguably, the best known and most popular example of International Modernist architecture in Germany The Van Nelle factory by Johannes Brinkman and Leendert van der Vlugt in Rotterdam is, arguably, the best known
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With their WerkBundStadt project the Werkbund Berlin aim to redevelop an industrial site in northern Berlin into a future orientated inner-city quarter. How can be explored in a new exhibition. WerkBundHaus Berlin Established in 1907 as an amalgamation of designers and manufactures, primarily with the intention of improving the quality of German industrial production - "Made in Germany" being at the end of the 19th century more an insult and synonym for shoddy tat than the quality guarantee
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August in Edinburgh is Festival, Fringe & Edinburgh College of Art Masters Degree Show. We enjoyed one of the three…… Edinburgh College of Art Occasionally, very, very occasionally, we genuinely think it might be us. Genuinely think there might be nothing wrong with the number of events during Milan Design Week. Genuinely think there is nothing wrong with the number of stages at the Glastonbury Festival. Genuinely think there is nothing wrong with the number of ice cream flavours on offer.
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"When I was very small, a little boy of five or six years old, I was certainly no infant prodigy, but I did do drawings with houses, with vases and flowers, with gypsy caravans, merry-go-rounds and cemeteries........"1 Thus began one of the more interesting design journeys of the twentieth century. Ettore Sottsass (Photo Barbara Radice, 1984 © and courtesy Studio Ettore Sottsass) Ettore Sottsass: From Architect to Designer Born In Innsbruck, Austria, on September 14th 1917 as the son of an
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(a+b)÷a = a÷b ≡ harmony? Or, the contemporary relevance of the Golden Ratio In addition to those artificial laws decreed by state and church our lives are also defined by innate laws, those of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and Murphy. But is there a law of harmony? A law which defines perfect proportions and thus the ideal form of any object? Proponents of the Golden Ratio would answer yes. With their exhibition Divine Golden Ingenious. The Golden Ratio as a Theory of Everything?
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Slowly but surely September is becoming Europe's summer. Whereas July and August increasingly fail to produce anything even vaguely "summery", we can always rely on September to deliver long balmy afternoons, and even longer, balmier, nights. Often juxtaposed with crisp, misty mornings under a fresh blue sky. It's almost as if September knows that once it is gone, autumn will grasp us by the shoulders and drag us, selfishly, into winter. As if September knows it is our last refuge. "Get out
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If a central component of the Bauhaus philosophy was, in essence, to make art useful for industrial production and thus give art a contemporary relevance and function, what to do in a post-industrial world?* The answer from the German art historian and architecture theorist Heinrich Klotz was to unify art with digital technology, and thus give art a contemporary relevance and function. Or the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, to give it its formal name; and an institution
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Although geographically the (hi)story of Vitra begins in Basel, spiritually it begins in America and arrives in Switzerland in 1957 with the licences to produce works by US designers such as Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, Isamu Noguchi and Alexander Girard; and then grows over the subsequent decades under the influence of the close co-operations which thus developed, for all those with George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames. Given this close affinity with and to America it was perhaps
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As East Berlin's Art and Design College the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee was in many ways symbolic of East Germany's difficult relationship with Bauhaus and the legacy of inter-war functionalism. On the one hand the DDR needed the reduced, cost effective, mass-market, industrial objects striven for during the period. On the other a need to define a new, socialist, tradition for the new, socialist, state meant an almost dogmatic rejection of everything associated with the pre-war "Germany",
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"Does the world really need ever more chairs?", is arguably the question we are most regularly asked. Alongside, "What do you actually do all day?" The answer to the second question depends on who posed it, in how far we hope to impress them or in how far we fear they may stop us doing what we do were they to discover what that actually is. The answer to the first question is "Yes" Or "Yes, if the new chair represents an advance over existing chairs" A chair being not something you sit on,
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On the steps leading to the entrance of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Schwäbisch Gmünd is embossed "Ich will Designer werden" - "I want to be a designer." With the criticism from Schwäbisch Gmünd alumni Markus Jehs concerning the quality of the discourse in global design education still ringing in our ears, we felt a very real need to grab a marker pen and add ", because..." We didn't. That would have be vandalism. Although if we're correctly informed graffiting on design schools is allowed,
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Such are the vagaries of the autumn/spring cycle in the global design exhibition industry, and it is an industry people, let's not fool ourselves otherwise, August is traditionally a very lean month: curators are on holiday, critics are on holiday, exhibition designers are on holiday, protagonists are on holiday. Who wants to open an exhibition? The following five museums. That's who.......... "Dream out Loud" at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Holland Whereas museum exhibitions generally
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The 18th century Prussian Monarch Friedrich der Große, or Alte Fritz - Old Fritz - as he is popularly known, has many claims to fame, not least of which is his promotion and advancing of the cultivation of the potato in the lands under his command, thus making him responsible for the tuber's contemporary popularity in northern Germany. And hence his other title: The Potato King. Friedrich was also a patron of the applied arts and handicrafts and in 1763 took over Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky's
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