December can be a trying month: always having to think of others; always having to patronise bars and restaurants you've spent the rest of the year wishing would return to the parallel hell from whence they came; eating, eating and eating as if trapped in some culinary Groundhog Day. Do yourself a favour, gift yourself a few hours and visit one of the following new design and architecture exhibitions opening in December 2015. We can't guarantee they'll be good, but can guarantee they'll be
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On Leipzig's Augustusplatz one can currently enjoy the wonders of the Leipzig Märchenland, the Leipzig Fairytale World. Alternatively, some 500m east of Augustusplatz in the Art Déco splendour of the Grassi Museum for Applied Arts one can enjoy the wonders of the equally narrative, if thankfully less preachy and moralising, Konstantin Grcic Märchenland. Or Konstantin Grcic - Panorama, to give its formal name. The Work Space, as seen at Konstantin Grcic – Panorama, Grassi Museum for Applied
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In our post from the Barbican Art Gallery exhibition "The World of Charles and Ray Eames" we noted the disappointing sparsity with which the otherwise excellent exhibition deals with the private world of Charles and Ray Eames. Arguing that understanding the designer is necessary to fully understanding their work. Charles and Ray are sadly no longer with us to directly answer our many questions; however, in the person of Charles's grandson Eames Demetrios we have an excellent alternative.
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It only seems like five minutes since two tall, neatly coiffured, strangers strode, self-confidently, across the floor of the old smow HQ in the, then, uncontrolled wilds of Leipzig's Plagwitz Village. "Who are they?", went the distrustful whisper round the office, "Tax inspectors?" "Customs?" "Health and Safety?" All eyes followed the strangers as they disappeared into the frosted glass anonymity of the meeting room. The tension in the office rose palpably. The only visitors known before
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The inclusion of a sheet steel bookend amongst our photos from the Grassi Museum for Applied Arts exhibition “Art Déco: Smart, Precious, Sensual” resulted in one or the other queried look in our direction, enquiries after our health and even questions as to if all our other photos were so unusable that, in our desperation, we had been reduced to using a shot of a piece of understatedly painted bent sheet steel. No, no we replied, all was good. As were the rest of our photos. That bookend
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The history of furniture design has an unignorable, if subtle and background, Hungarian accent; Marcel Breuer was one of the driving forces at Bauhaus and through his work with steel tubing, moulded plywood and sheet steel he helped advance ideas of contemporary furniture design, and continues to inspire; Paul László was one of the genuine pioneers of American industrial design and contributed to George Nelson's first Hermann Miller collection in 1948; and while Ernő Goldfinger may be best
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As we noted in our post celebrating Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle's 100th birthday, one of Paul Thiersch's first initiatives upon taking charge of the Handwerkerschule Halle, the future Burg Giebichenstein, was to establish workshops to connect art and trade and thus properly prepare his students for the demands of the emerging industries. It is therefore only fitting that to round off the institution's centenary celebrations an exhibition should be being staged celebrating the
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As older and more loyal readers will be aware if there is one thing we really, really dislike, more so than even "street food" or swans, it is black and white portrait photography. Which of course explains why we are so fascinated by the black and white portraits by Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn........ Anton Corbijn - Hollands Deep & 1-2-3-4 @ C/O Berlin Born in Strijen, Holland as the son of a clergyman and nurse Anton Corbijn taught himself photography in his teenage years and cut his
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All with an interest in and/or a desire to understand how historicism in architecture, art and design ceded to modernism could do worse than visit Germany this coming winter. Following on from the opening of the exhibitions "Art Nouveau. The Great Utopian Vision" at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg and "The Bauhaus #itsalldesign" at the Vitra Design Museum, the Grassi Museum for Applied Arts Leipzig have now closed the gap with their new exhibition Art Déco: Smart, Precious, Sensual
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By way of an addendum to our 5 New Design Exhibitions for November 2015 post, the Kaiserslautern University of Technology's Architecture Gallery are hosting "Jean Prouvé - vom System zum Haus" - "Jean Prouvé - from system to house" - in which the results of a semester project exploring the construction systems of Jean Prouvé are being presented. Although arguably best known for his furniture designs, a large part of Jean Prouvé's career and energy was spent developing, and indeed
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Since 2000 the International Marianne Brandt Contest has been searching for the Poetry of the Functional in art and design. That the triennial competition is still running doesn't mean they have yet to find it, rather underscores both the variety of interpretations inherent in the phrase and also the evolving nature of poetry, functionality and the relationship between the two: there is no definitive answer just an irregular array of contemporary, potentially fleeting, best fits. And over the
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On Thursday October 29th the winners of the Kölner DESIGN Preis 2015 were announced in a ceremony at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Köln, MAKK. Open to students from Cologne's seven creative colleges and their international partner institutions the 8th edition of Germany's highest endowed prize for student diploma projects carried a total prize money of €15,000 and saw 29 projects nominated, projects ranging from products, to concepts and onto more fundamental research. For us the use of
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In the complete interview with Matylda Krzykowski ahead of the Depot Basel exhibition Forum for an Attitude, there is a statement from Matylda which try as we might we simply could not crowbar into our published text: "most people have never visited a design show, art shows yes, but not design shows" It hadn't occurred to us before. But it's true. You don't go to design museums do you? And presumably also not architecture museums! Or certainly not architecture musems if you don't go to
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"I want to make the most simple furniture possible", so described Jean Angelats a.k.a Ateliers J&J his intentions in our recent interview. Intentions he more than underscores with the new objects in Ateliers J&J's 01 Evolution & 02 collections. Now we know there are cynics out there who will be of the opinion that given the acres of column space we've given Ateliers J&J of late it was always certain that we would like the new collection regardless of what it contained. OK. We understand
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We were first introduced to the work of Berlin based designer Uli Budde when we saw his "Reading Table" project at Designers Fair 2010 in Cologne. A delightfully simple object Reading Table combines table top and magazine/newspaper storage space in a manner that is as painfully obvious as it genial. An easily accessible, contemporary object the fact that no producer has seen fit to take it into production is one of those design mysteries which often keep us awake at night. Having begun his
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In our post from the exhibition Art Nouveau. The Great Utopian Vision at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg we stated, with a certain degree of authority, that "No one likes a hippy" The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis obviously do and are celebrating that fact with the exhibition Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia. Subtitled "An Examination of the Radical Art, Architecture, and Design of 1960s & 1970s Counterculture" the Walker Art Center's exhibition promises to explore
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"What is understood today as the housing problem is a specific intensification of the bad housing conditions endured by the working class through the sudden large scale movement of the population to the major cities; huge increases in rents, an even greater overcrowding of individuals in houses, and for some the impossibility of even finding suitable accommodation." 1 Although written in 1872 Friedrich Engels analysis of the urban housing situation remains in many ways as contemporary as it
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Before Fritz Haller achieved international recognition for the USM modular furniture system, he was........ a steel construction system! USM Construction System Haller, as represented in a USM advert from 1971 Born in Solothurn, Switzerland on October 23rd 1924, the young Fritz Haller trained as a draughtsman before gaining architectural experience in the offices of various Swiss architects. In 1948 Fritz Haller travelled to Rotterdam where he spent a year working in the office of the Dutch
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"The World of Charles and Ray Eames" It is inherent in the nature of America's most productive 20th century creatives that there is no "world" of Charles and Ray Eames; there are "worlds" In their new Eames retrospective the Barbican Art Gallery London attempt to combine these worlds into a coherent, comprehensible universe. The World of Charles and Ray Eames @ Barbican Art Gallery London Charles Eames was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1907. Ray Kaiser in Sacramento, California in 1912.
read moreIn our design calender post on the inaugural Memphis Exhibition in Milan we noted that although important for the development of design and architecture, the Memphis group was never that successful commercially. Which is not to say that Memphis furniture wasn't bought and used to furnish homes. According to Artemide co-founder Ernesto Gismondi, who also served as Managing Director of the Memphis trading company, there are, or at least were, two homes furnished exclusively with Memphis. And
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No one likes a hippy. Which might explain the ambivalence many have towards Art Nouveau. For with its floral motifs, visual dreamscapes, hopeless utopianism and all-pervading fascination with nudity, Art Nouveau is in many ways the original hippy movement. And this association may also be what bestows the preeminent international arts and architecture movement of the late 19th and early 20th century its unmistakable smack of kitsch, its perceived lack of contemporary cultural relevance.
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The WA 24 table lamp by Wilhelm Wagenfeld is without question one of the most instantly recognisable pieces of Bauhaus design, so much so that it is often referred to as simply "the Bauhaus Lamp". Designed by Wilhelm Wagenfeld in 1923 the WA 24 was quickly followed by a series of variations on the theme, yet all maintaining the same pared-down grace and uncomplicated functional elegance of the original. Characteristics which can just as easily be applied to Bauhaus itself as to Wagenfeld's
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Among the more interesting and entertaining texts we didn't publish from IMM Cologne 2015 was our post on the showcase "The Journey of Things" featuring works by 6 Berlin and 2 London based designers. It would have been a great text. Had it been published. That it wasn't is one of those mysteries which only those with an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the smow blog can understand. Fortunately for us, and indeed all in or near Berlin in the coming weeks, until October 31st works
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Established in Brussels in 2011 by the French born, Belgian based craftsmen Jean Angelats and Jonathan Renou, Ateliers J&J released their inaugural collection in 2013. Presenting a range of domestic furnishing items crafted from bent tubular steel and solid wood Ateliers J&J's Collection 01 did nothing particularly innovative - and did it with a self-assured grace and composure that raised it far above the average and reminded us all just how enriching honestly conceived, well-proportioned,
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