Charles Eames is arguably the best known representative of post-war American design. His works are certainly the most commonly recognized and endearing examples of post-war American design. Yet exactly because of the success of his post-war work it is often forgotten that Charles Eames has a pre-war biography, a biography that is pre-Ray Kaiser, pre-George Nelson, pre-Hermann Miller, pre-Vitra, pre-plywood, plastic and aluminium, pre-IBM, Moscow, India, Mathematica, Franklin & Jefferson.... and
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There is little in this world that brings us more pleasure than a good modular shelving system. We know that sentence speaks volumes about the state of our alleged "lives", but we're not embarrassed to admit it. We like shelves. Consequently, given that it appears that everybody but everybody is developing a modular shelving system and that as a result you currently can't visit a furniture fair or design event without stumbling every few metres across another new system, these would appear
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In our recent post "Blurred Lines or What if Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke designed furniture?" we took a stroll along the very fine border between being inspired by a piece of furniture design and plagiarising a piece of furniture design. One of the most popular sources for both inspiration and plagiarism is Charles and Ray Eames: for inspiration because of the many ground breaking designs, processes and theories the pair developed over the decades, for plagiarism because of the
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Customs are a form of social regulation. Love them or loath them customs allow us to form connections, to find a sense of stability and order, to differentiate ourselves from others, align ourselves with others, and not least enjoy regular festivities and parties as customs are celebrated and/or enacted. Customs are therefore inherently good. Unless it is the sort of Customs which sit at the border between two counties and stop a young Swiss ceramicist displaying their work at an
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The first thing any carpentry apprentice does is build their own wooden toolbox. It makes sense. You're learning to work with wood, you will need somewhere to keep all your chisels and saws. So you build a toolbox. The first thing anyone wanting to chop logs does is make their own wooden axe head ? Or perhaps better put ?????????????????? But why couldn't it be the case, for as HFBK Hamburg student Bastian Austermann demonstrates with his Splitting Wood project, such is eminently
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Much as we adore our pets they can be troublesome. Be it the cat the refuses to move from your bed, the dog that chews your shoes, pillows, newspapers et al, or the sweary parrot embarrassing us at every (inopportune) moment. If only we could distract them. Maybe we should treat them better? Or at least treat them to better possessions, to objects that meet a standard of functionality and design quality that we demand from our objects. We’re not averse to claiming our pets are family members,
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As we have often noted in these pages, a combination of increasing automation, advancing technology, the changing nature of industry and commerce and the associated evolution of the term "office work" will increasingly enforce changes in office furniture design. And we're not being particularly clever or perceptive when we say such, its simply how the process works, how office furniture design has always progressed: be it the evolution of the office chair in the 19th century as ever more
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When making biscuits, after having cut out the required shapes you invariably have a lot of dough left over, dough you clump together, roll out again and use to make more biscuits. A process which can be repeated ad nauseam until all your dough is used. With leather you can't. Having cut the required shapes from your chosen piece of leather you are left with a lot of holes surrounded by a lot of waste leather. It is therefore little surprise that the furniture, fashion, automotive, luxury
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In context of DMY 2015 the Berlin/Beijing based cultural exchange association Migrant Birds are presenting the exhibition Modern Fossils, a solo exhibition of works by the Beijing based artist and designer Song Tao. Migrant Birds present Modern Fossils by Song Tao Born in Shanghai in 1969 Song Tao initially graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1986 before moving to France to complete a Masters degree in Plastic Arts at the Université Paris 1. Although Song Tao’s
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As we believe we've said before, and assume we will repeat in the future, contemporary Dutch design is largely, though not exclusively, about the research, and the subsequent processes invariably developed. If it leads to a product, that's good. But it needn't. That it however often does can be experienced in the exhibition Contemporary Creation Processes in Design on show at DAD Galerie Berlin. Curated by Berlin based, Eindhoven graduate Ruben der Kinderen Contemporary Creation Processes in
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On Thursday June 11th the 2015 DMY International Design Festival opens its doors to the public, and Berlin will once again be the focus of the global design community. But is Berlin the creative city many assume it to be? Beats the creative heart genuinely with a different rhythm, and with more fervour, on the banks of the Spree than elsewhere? Or is "Berlin Design" just a nice bit of location marketing behind which stands little more than non-stop parties and endless cheap lifestyle
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As previously reported, the company DMY Berlin GmbH & Co. KG, who for the past decade or so has run the annual DMY Berlin design festival, filed for insolvency in October 2014: the festival itself however continues under the auspices of a new organiser, about:design. “DMY is dead. Long live DMY”, as it were. The 2015 edition of DMY opens for professional, specialist, visitors at 10am on Thursday June 11th, at 6pm that evening to the general public, and runs until Sunday June 14th. Ahead of
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On March 10th 2015 a jury at the Central District Court of California in Los Angeles concluded that Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke had relied a little too heavily on Marvin Gaye's 1977 hit "Got to Give It Up" when composing their track "Blurred Lines". For infringement of Gaye's copyright the court ordered Williams and Thicke to pay Marvin Gaye's estate $7.4 million dollars. Responding to the judgement Pharrell Williams mused in the Financial Times that "the verdict handicaps any creator
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"The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler", confided the American author, ecologist and conservationist Aldo Leopold in his 1949 book "A Sand County Almanac", "The flash of his gold-and-blue plumage amid the dank decay of the June woods is in itself proof that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa." The following five new design and architecture exhibitions are our prothonotary warblers: proving as they, hopefully, do that abstract ideas
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From June 1st until June 7th the 15th D'Days Paris will be staged under the theme "Experience" Which is hopefully something one has gathered sufficient of after 14 festivals. Featuring contributions from some 100+ creatives the principle focus of D'Days Paris 2015 is, as ever, in-store presentations including, for example, a vapour installation from Krux Amsterdam in the Boffi flagship store, a special presentation of Kartell's latest products in a scenography designed by Ferruccio Laviani in
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Given that Bauhaus is often perceived as having been an incubator for the creative talents of the 1920s, it is perhaps fitting that windows salvaged from Bauhaus Dessau should have been upcycled into a greenhouse for the Bauhaus Archiv Berlin. Or at least into a greenhouse-esque structure for the Bauhaus Archiv Berlin. Conceived, planned and realised by Berlin architectural practice zukunftsgeraeusche GbR together with the Bauhaus Archiv Berlin, Technischen Universität Berlin and Wagner
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"Rare is the human backside that hasn't found solace and support in Mr. Day's most famous creation", thus, with just a touch of music hall sauciness, begins Bruce Weber his obituary to the British designer Robin Day in the New York Times from November 20th 2010, before continuing, "a molded polypropylene shell fastened to an enameled bent tubular steel base that has become familiar seating in schools, churches, offices, auditoriums, home patios, kitchens, dens, bedrooms and basements around the
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How can the urban environment be improved with new housing? Which spatial constellations foster interaction? Which strategies reduce costs but still produce a high quality? How can we initiate a new era of house building? Such and similar questions are posed, and possible answers presented, in the exhibition URBAN LIVING - Strategies for the Future currently on show at the Deutsches Architektur Zentrum DAZ in Berlin. URBAN LIVING - Strategies for the Future at the Deutsches Architektur
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To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Fritz Haller and Paul Schärer's USM Haller modular furniture system USM instigated a series of masterclasses in which students at seven international design schools were paired with a mentor and asked to "Rethink the Modular" and for all to "consider the significance of modularity in architecture and design" and so "exploit the idea of modularity for contemporary design". The results of the academic exercise were unveiled in an exhibition premièred during
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As we noted in our post on the exhibition Open World at Kazerne Eindhoven, for a city that is often cited as the hub of contemporary European creativity, there isn't much on show publicly in downtown Eindhoven. Rather than being the bustling hive of vision and inspiration one may expect, the centre of Eindhoven is in many ways a textbook example of the sort of monochrome, backwater provincial town that could vanish overnight without anybody noticing. Save of course photographers who specialise
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Shium is the many ways the Korean antipode to our modern world: Shium is decelerate, rest, relax, pause, reflect, slow down. Refresh body and soul Shium is also the foundation on which the exhibition Tools for A Break – Korean Crafts and Design is built, and following its première during Munich Creative Business Week 2015, Tools for A Break – Korean Crafts and Design is currently on show in Berlin. Tools for A Break - Korean Crafts and Design at Orangelab Berlin Fascinated by the diversity
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One of the biggest disappointments of Milan Furniture Fair 2015 was that all manufacturers, or at least all the ones we visited, seem almost pathologically intent on maintaining the convention of a chair as a legged and/or cantilevered object which supports the human frame in an elevated position circa 40 - 45 cms above the floor and with the lower leg extended away from the body. Yet changing technology is resulting in a need for new chair typologies, for chairs which offer alternative
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Several visitors to the Milan furniture fair with whom we spoke, including some whose judgement on such matters we value more than our own, were very excited by the new Uffici chair by Nitzan Cohen for Mattiazzi. We were, and remain, less convinced. Yes with its rigid, unyielding, duck bill-esque form and integrated mesh backrest we can see and understand that it is something new, something different. Yes, its mix of wood and synthetic weave is a nice interplay on two epochs of office chair
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Floris Wubben is a rare and precious being. Floris Wubben is a contemporary Dutch designer who didn't study at Design Academy Eindhoven. When we ask him how such a situation can arise, why he didn't attend Eindhoven, he smiles and replies that we're not the first to ask him that, everybody it seems wants to know. An indication of just how rare and precious a being he is. Floris Wubben does of course have his atelier in Eindhoven. Anything else would be far too absurd, if not illegal, and
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