"What was the best moment of your life?" ask Cologne based Pell Architekten in the introduction to their contribution to smow Cologne's forthcoming exhibition Waidblicke, "Has it been or is it still to come? OK, but along the way there's been good moments. Where were they?" Where indeed.... Since October 2013 smow Cologne have been resident in the city's Waidmarkt - The Woad Market - a location that can trace its history back to the Roman occupation of the modern Colonia and which achieved a
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According to Christian Holmsted Olesen, Hans J. Wegner's famous JH540 Valet Chair with its coat hanger shaped backrest and pop up seat almost never saw the light of day. Following its presentation at the 1951 Copenhagen Carpenters Guild Exhibition Wegner decided he didn't actually like the four legged chair after all, and announced that it shouldn't be produced. However King Frederik IX had seen it, was fascinated by both concept and design and demanded that it be produced. He wanted one. He
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In context of Cape Town's tenure as World Design Capital 2014 Franco-Austrian design and architecture studio Celia-Hannes spent six weeks on the Cape of Good Hope working with local residents and craftsman on questions surrounding contemporary living conditions and furniture. The first results of the cooperation are being presented during Vienna Design Week 2014 at design gallery harald bichler_rauminhalt. And no, it wasn't some neo-colonial "white man come help" project, or at least wasn't
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In our 5 New Design Exhibitions for October 2014 post we noted the revolutionary construction techniques Ludwig Mies van der Rohe employed in his Villa Tugendhat Brno and Barcelona Expo Pavilion projects from 1929-30; in both cases the roof being fully supported by the outer walls thus freeing the interior walls of their load carrying function and as such allowing for a more open room division. At that time a genuinely new idea. Over thirty years after realising these works Mies van der Rohe in
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The last time we visited the premises of Vienna shoemaker Rudolf Scheer & Söhne it was for the presentation of Antoinette Bader's LacesLamp project during Vienna Design Week 2010. Since then little has changed in the way Rudolf Scheer & Söhne make their shoes, but a lot has in terms of the space. Situated next to the company's main premises the so-called SHEER-Raum has been transformed from the dust and brick building site of then into a sensitively decorated and organised sales space. And a
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As we alluded to in our post from Vienna based design studio chmara.rosinke's Passionswege 2013 project with Wäscheflott, we've not always been the biggest fans of the work of chmara.rosinke. Or better put Ania Rosinke and Maciej Chmara a.k.a. chmara.rosinke have regularly produced projects which have, in one way or another, caused us to roll our eyes helplessly skywards. On the other hand chmara.rosinke have also regularly impressed us. The aforementioned project with Wäscheflott being one
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"I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers" exclaims Anne Shirley in Lucy Maud Montgomery's 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables, "it would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn't it?" Yes Anne, it would. Yet while Ms Shirley turned her youthful attention to decorating her bedroom with the brightly coloured maple branches so prevalent on Prince Edward Island at this time of year, our joy is found in the new architecture and design exhibitions opening in the
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In our post from the launch of the Tools for Life collection by Rem Koolhaas and OMA for Knoll during Milan Design Week 2013 we noted that the highlight for us was the so-called "11 Floor Seating" legless chair. For all we commented that with ever more time, professional and personal, being spent working with tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices, the requirements of chairs was slowly evolving and that there would be an increasing need for high-quality furniture which allows one to,
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Time was when the candlestick maker was an important profession. No candlestick. No light. Or at least no secure light. These days with our fancy electric lighting candlesticks tend to be reduced to one of those quaint historical artefacts. Something every designer and craftsman tries at least once in their career, but a relatively safe place where they can experiment and try things out without necessarily having to produce anything good. No one is going to judge you by a candlestick. A
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As we've often noted in these pages, the future will be analogue. That's not to say that we will turn our backs on all our modern technology, but much more as technology takes over ever more aspects of our daily lives and as we understand what technology can do and how best to harness it, not only will we be freed to concentrate on those things which genuinely matter to us but we will have ever more freedom to organise and lead our lives as we want, freed from the conventions and constraints
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Since 2013, and in what one could almost term a "Danube Design Festival", in addition to Vienna Design Week late September has also seen the nearby Slovakian capital Bratislava host an annual design week. We know, we know, design weeks are the new marathon or the new film festival, every city needs one as part of their location marketing, "LOOK!!! WE'RE CREATIVE!!!" scream metropoli from Australia to Scandinavia, from Asia to America. We know. However we also belong to a very select group
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At the risk of starting a tradition we can't maintain, and so ultimately leading us to disappoint a lot of readers, again, it is becoming tradition that our first post from Vienna Design Week concerns a Passionswege project. Largely because Passionswege is one of the principle reasons we come to Vienna, and so it seems fitting to begin our time in Vienna with the Passionswege programme. But also considering Passionswege is the seed from which Vienna Design Week grew, it just seems respectful.
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Everyone knows Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto. Everyone knows his flowing, free-formed buildings and his moulded plywood furniture. What is there new to learn? What is the point in another Alvar Aalto exhibition. What indeed................................ Born in Kuortane Finland on February 3rd 1898 Alvar Aalto began studying architecture at the Helsinki University of Technology in 1916, graduating in 1921 and established his own architectural practice in Jyväskyla in 1923. In
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As many of you will be aware, among the myriad of things that regularly get our goat, architecture photography is right up there. Architecture photography and the way the modern digital media fawningly reproduce every heavily photoshopped image that lands in their inboxes. The camera does lie. But then it always has, and as we noted in our post from the exhibition New Architecture! Modern Architecture in Images and Books at the Bauhaus Archiv Berlin, even in the days of analogue photography
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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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