On Friday September 26th the Egon Eiermann Society will present the inaugural "Egon Eiermann Chair" Award at a ceremony in the Neue Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche in Berlin. Initiated to recognise those individuals or organisations who have made an especially valuable contribution to the maintenance and preservation of Egon Eiermann's works the first Egon Eiermann Chair will be awarded to Barbara and Eckard Düwal for their restoration of the so-called Wohnhaus Matthies in Potsdam-Babelsberg.
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We've spent a lot of 2014 travelling backwards on trains, racing towards the future with our eyes fixed firmly on the past. We know its a metaphor. We just hope it isn't an omen. Time will, as ever, tell. And with this being late September, the next five weeks will see us travelling backwards through the European design landscape with an unhealthy, and fate taunting, regularity. Our Autumn Tour 2014 begins at Vienna Design Week where, aside from the Passionswege projects, were particularly
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As we recently noted, summer is slowly giving way to autumn and with it the realisation that long sunny days lounging in gardens or on poolsides will slowly give way to long sunless days in office chairs. Autumn 2014 also means for us Orgatec, Europe's largest office furniture trade fair, and an invariable flood of "new" office chair "designs." Consequently, it should come as no surprise that we recently took our copy of Jonathan Olivares' A Taxonomy of Office Chairs from the (smow) bookshelf.
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As has oft been noted in these pages, the years following the Second World War were years of quick, radical, fundamental social, cultural and economic change. Changes from which the then fledgling furniture design industry greatly benefited: and from which it continues to benefit with many of the popular mass market designs created back then becoming the design classics of today. The design week having not yet been invented and those furniture trade fairs that existed being very much the
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For a man who is universally lauded as one of the most important Danish designers of the 20th century, there is an inexplicable scarcity of reliable, independent information on Poul Henningsen. At least in languages other than Danish. Even the British Library in London, the self proclaimed keeper of the "world's knowledge", can only offer a couple of non-Danish language texts. Library shelves around the globe however buckle under the weight of Danish language works by and about Poul
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Charlotte Perriand was famously of the opinion that in terms of furniture design wood was a “… vegetable substance, bound in its very nature to decay,….” and that the future belonged to metal. For all the bent steel tubing of European modernism.1 Poul Henningsen in contrast warned that the industrial production of steel tube furniture as promoted by Perriand, Le Corbusier, the Bauhaus clique and their ilk "maa ogsaa føre til, at de sekundære Former ved Stolen" - may also lead to secondary
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Following the assimilation of the Cooper Union Design Museum in New York into the Smithsonian Institution as the Copper-Hewitt Museum, founding director Lisa Taylor wanted an opening exhibition which reflected and celebrated not only the museum's new status but also its new direction and which visually translated the "philosophy of the Smithsonian Institution's new National Museum of Design"1 To this end in 1974 selected designers and architects, including Richard Saul Wurman, Charles and Ray
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By way of an addendum to our "Five New Design Exhibitions for September 2014" post, until November 2nd the Kunstgewerbemuseum Dresden are presenting the exhibition Okolo Offline Two - Collecting. Organised by the Kunstgewerbemuseum in collaboration with Depot Basel, "Okolo Offline Two" follows on from the exhibition Okolo Offline held at Depot Basel in April this year. As with Okolo Offline One the central pillar of Okolo Offline Two is formed by the Prague based creative collective Okolo and
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Am Anfang war der Pneu - first there was air - so hypothesised the German architect and master of lightweight construction Frei Otto: a conviction which led him to spend a large part of his career attempting to reduce architecture back to its natural origins and build a permanent structure "constructed" solely from air. And although he never realised his dream of material-less construction Frei Otto did develop a couple of very interesting studies, including the 1971 Arctic City project which
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1989. A year of social, culture and political upheaval whose effects are still being felt today. The Berlin Wall falls. George Bush is sworn in as 41st President of the United States of America. Nirvana release their debut album Bleach. The Poll Tax is introduced in Scotland. The first episode of The Simpsons airs. And while not wanting to over dramatise the situation, yet clearly and deliberately doing just that in the interests of an introduction, 1989 also saw the opening of the Vitra Design
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Erected in 1927 in context of the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition "Die Wohnung" the Weißenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart aimed to achieve "…. a reduction in house construction and running costs, in addition to a simplification of housework and a general improvement in living standards" But did it? Or is it just a collection of buildings by Max Taut, Hans Poelzig, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Mart Stam, Peter Behrens and their ilk? A chance for a close connected group of modernists to show off?
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Just as the devil has the best tunes so does nature posses all the best structural forms. Consequently engineers and designers have long looked to nature for inspiration, the results being as varied, mundane and ultimately important as Velcro, turbines and even train noses. The secret of course is knowing where to look. The early "bird men", for example, thought flight was all about flapping. It isn't. It's about air flows, keel-shaped sternums and hollow bones. Once that had been understood
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The inescapable chill in the morning air and the deep-seated boredom in the eyes of school aged children can only mean that summer is, ever so slowly, coming to an end. And just as spring beckons life to return in the natural world, so to does autumn herald a revival of activity in the unnatural world of museums and galleries. Consequently, whereas in August we only managed to find three architecture and design exhibitions to recommend, for September we have seven! A Magnificent Seven who
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Parallel to the exhibition "Aus allen Richtungen" at the AIT ArchitekturSalon in Cologne and its exploration of 30 young German architects relationships to their profession, the Johannesburg Museum of African Design presents examples of how 12 young German architects transform this philosophical relationship into tangible projects. Focussing on projects realised since 2004 outwith Germany the exhibition presents projects by a dozen young architects/architectural practices which in the words of
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Back in February the participants of the exhibition "Trading Places. Designers meet the collection" at the Kunstgewerbemuseum Dresden spent two days trawling through the museum's depots looking for objects with which to work. During the tour Daphna Isaacs and Laurens Manders, aka Eindhoven based studio Daphna Laurens, were shown inside a drawer. Walked on. Stopped. Walked back. Looked inside the drawer again and asked Herr Knorr, Head of metal, glass and ceramics at the Kunstgewerbemuseum,
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No sooner had we published our post on the innovative high-tech world of silbærg snowboards, than we received information on a fascinating project producing older than old skool skateboards. Initiated by Royal Academy of Art, The Hague graduate Bastiaan van Druten, Woody skateboards are created from elm trees which had to be felled in Amsterdam and Utrecht "...because of disease or because they were in the way of capitalism" Which is a turn of phrase almost as exquisite as the skateboards
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It is very apposite that the Grassi Museum for Applied Arts Leipzig is currently hosting a special presentation dedicated to the designer Rudolf Horn: for here began the story of one of Rudolf Horn's more interesting projects, the somewhat unfortunately named Conferstar club chair. And yes it does look like Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Chair. It's supposed to. In 1962 Rudolf Horn was sitting in his office in Leipzig and was, by his own admission, fed up. And so decided to visit the Grassi
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In the past we have, admittedly, been "somewhat" harsh on Chemnitz. Unfairly so considered some. Many. "C'mon! Chemnitz isn't all that bad!!!!" being the general response. And so we decide to investigate a little more closely, to peer behind our prejudices and explore contemporary creativity in Chemnitz. Beginning with snowboard manufacturer silbærg. Initiated in the context of a research project at the Chemnitz Technical University silbærg snowboards make use of so-called Anisotropic Layer
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When we stated in our 5 New Design Exhibitions for August 2014 post that there were only three exhibitions opening in August worth recommending, we were, it would appear, being somewhat hasty. On Thursday August 21st the exhibition Aus allen Richtungen. Positionen junger Architekten im BDA opens at the AIT ArchitekturSalon Cologne. Presenting works by some 30 young German architects Aus allen Richtungen is a touring exhibition in which each architect and/or architectural practice is given an
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In our post from the excellent exhibition Croatian Holiday at Vienna Design Week 2012 we questioned the curators assertion that through incorporating contemporary designers into a nation's tourist industry one could help that nation promote a contemporary national identity abroad. Our scepticism wasn't levied at the employment of designers in, for example, creating furniture for hotels, the interior design of tourist attractions or promotional material, but much more about employing designers
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Any self-respecting modern conurbation needs a moniker. An evocative tag line on which to hang its city marketing strategy and attract tourists. Paris is of course the City of Love, Rome the Eternal City, Prague the City of a Hundred Spires while Edinburgh, whether advisable or not, regails as simply Auld Reekie. In 1998 the southern German town of Weil am Rhein re-christened itself "City of Chairs" If we're honest the reason why escapes us, for aside from Vitra there is, as far as we are
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As previously noted in these pages the (hi)story of modernism is largely one of successful male/female partnerships, the most famous questionably being Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich or Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand in the main period of inter-war European modernism and Charles and Ray Eames in context of the post-war American adaptation. Yet it is also a (hi)story with only very few identifiable female leads. From the examples above Lilly Reich, Charlotte Perriand and Ray
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"Plastic was equivalent with America for us. Only Bakelite came from Europe. Right? But after the war, everything plastic came to Italy from the States. Purely commercial stuff, but every year a new material came on the market", recalled Italian architect and designer Anna Castelli Ferrieri in a 1997 interview, "We wanted to try out what all can be made with these new materials"1 And try she did. With an élan that resulted in an enviable portfolio of products that have not only become
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Over the years we have regularly highlighted the fact that buying cheap copies of established furniture design classics is not only an economically and socially questionable strategy, but is also potentially dangerous. Just how potentially dangerous being very neatly illustrated in a recent test undertaken by our colleagues at (smow) Australia. As noted previously, (smow) Australia are not direct, blood, relatives but more second cousins through marriage; we are however bound by a shared
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