For just about as long as Thonet have been producing furniture one of the company's most important designers has been "Thonet Design Team", a description we've always considered to be a rather disparagingly sterile and unnecessarily nebulous description for Thonet's team of in-house designers. Every serious contemporary furniture manufacturer has an in-house design team who are responsible for both helping adapt external designers works to the company's production patterns and also creating
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In 2010 the spectacularly sinister sounding Hungarian Ministry of Human Capacities launched a programme to help promote products made in workshops employing persons with disabilities; and since 2013 the Segítő Vásárlás label - Design that Helps - has been coordinated by the Salva Vita Foundation. In June 2014 the Salva Vita Foundation organised a "Design Date" event which brought participating workshops and Hungarian design studios together with the aim of fostering new co-operations and
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Much as we all like to assume we all know everything there is to know about modernism, and convinced as we all are that we can name all the important protagonists and their key works. We largely can't. We can largely scratch the surface of modernism and name a handful of the best known protagonists and name a few of their better known works. Just how little the vast majority of us truly understand about modernism is currently being laid bare in the exhibition "Der entfesselte Blick – Die
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One of the highlights for us of Dutch Design Week 2014 is and was the showcase of works by Eindhoven based studio Ontwerpduo a.k.a. Tineke Beunders and Nathan Wierink. For although in the past we have seen various Ontwerpduo projects individually, there is no real alternative to seeing a studio's collection together in order to build a more complete picture of the designers and their work. In addition to reunions with those Ontwerpduo products with which we were already familiar, including the
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At the risk of overusing the phrase "a concept that grows on us the more XXXX adds to it" and so reducing a genuine sign of respect to irrelevant dribble: Stefan Diez's New Order system for HAY is a concept that grows on us the more Stefan Diez adds to it. What began life as relatively simple contemporary shelving system is being presented at Orgatec 2014 as a fully fledged office system. We've always liked New Order, but the more it grows, the more it appeals. Apart from the systems
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As long as we've been going to Vienna Design Week the festival has always included a focus on social responsibility. Design is not all about large companies presenting their latest projects or young designers developing expensive gallery pieces, design is also about helping to improve our world, be that the direct vicinity or at the global level. Vienna Design Week understand this. And always try to ensure we all do. One of the more interesting projects in this respect at Vienna Design Week
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The presentation of Dirk Vander Kooij's current collection during Dutch Design Week 2014 took place at Kazerne - the new star in Eindhoven's already well illuminated design sky. Established by designers/curators Annemoon Geurts and Koen Rijnbeek who used run the temporary Eat Drink Design "exhibition restaurant" during Dutch Design Week, Kazerne is their new permanent "exhibition restaurant". They obviously having tired of "popping up" once a year. Featuring a combination restaurant cum
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The history of furniture design is famously also a history of experimentation, re-configuring, re-thinking and often of designers changing materials in the course of product development. Charles and Ray Eames' plastic chair family famously began life as a steel chair family, Harry Thaler's aluminium Pressed Chair for Moormann began life as a wooden chair, and in contrast the first USM Haller units were wood, before the switch to steel. And so the fact that Budapest based designer András
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In comparison to the annual IMM Cologne furniture fair the corridors and halls of the Messe Cologne always seems curiously empty at the biennial Orgatec office furniture trade fair. Until that is one reaches the Vitra stand. And the crowds. The almost congenital attraction of Orgatec visitors to Vitra is unquestionably related to the high-calibre roster of international designers responsible for the Vitra office programme. At Orgatec 2014 that programme has been extended by, amongst other
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For us the passion, indeed interest, for living in a shared flat ended approximately 18 months before we moved out of our last shared flat. It ceased to be our thing. We needed our peace. We needed our space. We became anti-social. Some people however remain sociable. Even professionally. Some such as the design studios Daphna Laurens, Studio Mieke Meijer, OS ∆ OOS, Studio Maatwerk and Bogaerts Label who since summer 2014 have shared a space in the so-called TAB Building, somewhat inevitably a
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On Wednesday October 22nd the exhibition "Martino Gamper - design is a state of mind" opens at the Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin. Curated by London based, Italian born designer Martino Gamper, design is a state of mind premièred at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery London over the summer of 2014 and is in effect two exhibitions in one. In the first Martino Gamper presents a series of shelving systems dating from the 1930s to the 21st century; a collection of shelving systems that not only present
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Back in the day when the CD was new and exciting we remember watching a breakfast TV host spread honey on one to demonstrate how indestructible they were. Other CDs were attacked with keys, dowsed in hot coffee and stood on. These days we all know much better. CDs are destructible. We've seen the light. And at Dutch Design Week 2014 you can can see the light a recycled CD emits. Or at least the luminescence produced by a mass of recycled CDs in the thoughtfully and intelligently formed
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Proving that Eindhoven is full of old factories, but that they are not necessarily all former Philips factories, Sectie C is a former industrial estate on the eastern edge of Eindhoven that has become home to a, seemingly, thriving community of creatives. Featuring a nice mix of creative genres and small businesses Sectie C's real charm is the way the tenants have colonised the available space just as vegetation does in derelict industrial estates: offices constructed under the rafters like
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Time was when Leipzig hosted two fayres per year, one at Easter and one at Michaelmas. The Easter Fair has since given way to a grotesque faux middle ages market. And no we're not using grotesque as a synonym for the pains and discomforts of the middle ages as reflected in the stalls, shows and characters who compose the market experience. We mean its painful and uncomfortable. The Michaelmas Fair however has evolved much more agreeably and is now ably represented by the annual Grassimesse.
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It is very rare that one comes across an object where a manufacturer has combined two independently developed products into one. And even rarer that we like such an object. Our natural resistance reaction is to say, No. No. Not on our watch. Begone. We were however instantly taken with the so-called Blumenampel Edition by Zascho Petkow and Birgit Severin for Berlin based Atelier Haussmann. Possibly because initially we didn't know its provenance. That only became clear in conversation with
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In 1951 the German designer Wilhelm Wagenfeld created a glass punch bowl for Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik, WMF: the clou of which is a glass tube which passes through the lid and down to the bottom of the bowl. The ideas being to fill this tube with ice, when the ice, inevitably, melts the resulting water remains separate from the punch, can be thrown away and replaced with fresh ice. Thus ensuring your punch remains chilled, and unadulterated, until the last drop. A revolution in its
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Ever since Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec released their Alcove Sofa for Vitra in 2006 ever more furniture objects have appeared on the market which promise the owner the opportunity to create flexible room partition solutions. To create rooms within rooms and provide a place in which to separate yourself from a home that is becoming ever more an office. To find safety in the midst of the unending data, information and sensory flood. Or just amongst the kid's mess. And with very few exceptions,
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Despite what popular myth may have you believe, the Design Academy Eindhoven is not alone responsible for Eindhoven's current status as one of the most important design city's in Europe. But love it or loath it there is no getting away from the Design Academy's influence on the development of contemporary European design. And so of course on Eindhoven's current status as one of the most important design city's in Europe. Consequently the annual Design Academy Graduate Show is one of the
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At an otherwise disappointing presentation of projects by students from the TU Graz Institute of Spatial Design during Vienna Design Week, a genuine stand out project was the valet Servant by Katharina Wernig. Brazenly contradicting the position we took with Fidelio by Christian Spiess that a chair is the most natural form for a valet, Katharina Wernig has opted instead for a side table-cum-valet. Or at least side table-cum-semi-valet. For while in our book a valet must include an option for
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"Marcel Breuer seeing a pair of bicycle handle-bars decided to make chairs using the same industrial process. The new world constructor seeing a pair of bicycle handle-bars decides to use them as they are and save himself the trouble and expense of bending the tube."1 So articulated Jasper Morrison in his 1984 text "The Poet will not Polish" not only the theoretical background to his Handlebar Table, but much more the frustration and alienation being felt at that time by a young generation of
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Much like crisps, cardboard furniture is something with which we have a very troubled relationship. However whereas with crisps the problem is saying no: with cardboard furniture it is saying yes. We know that cardboard furniture makes sense, or at least can make sense. We even once developed our own cardboard chair, the (smow) chair But most cardboard furniture simply doesn't appeal to us. There is invariably something about the form, the construction or a pig ugly aesthetic we simply
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In 1907 a loose association of German architects, artists and industrialists joined forces as the Deutsche Werkbund - the German Industrial Association. Principally established with the aim of helping German industry adapt to the technological advances of the age and so help them both prepare for the forthcoming industrialisation and ensure that the coming challenges were met with high quality products and healthy, happy workers, the Deutsche Werkbund founders were additionally motivated by a
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As already noted, until Friday October 31st smow Cologne are presenting the exhibition Stadt-Land-schafft. Making use of smow Cologne's generous window space and even more generous Waidmarkt frontage, Stadt-Land-schafft presents eight interpretations of urban topology and the conflict/synergy between our natural and our built environments. And so, for example, Aachen based K2 Architekten present the installation Barb[el] which reflects on how city and countryside merge with one another without
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Ask most people what they identify as the central feature in the work of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí and they'll probably mention the abstract Gothic revival forms of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona or the flowing, organic mosaics of Park Güell. Certainly something visual, potentially something decorative. Ask art historian, critic and internationally recognised Antoni Gaudí expert Daniel Giralt-Miracle, and he won't. "The skeleton is the central feature of Gaudí's work, everything else
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