Strolling through the corridors of the Dresden Museum of Decorative Arts, the Kunstgewerbemuseum, one comes across a presentation called "Thronfolge" - Throne Succession - featuring three 18th century thrones which belonged to successive Sachsen Kings. And a Well Tempered Chair by Ron Arad. A delightful piece of juxtaposition made all the more enjoyable on account of the relative ease with which Arad's uncouth bent steel scoundrel fits in with the gilded and velvet noble decadence of yore. In
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Back in 2011 we took umbrage at the fence surrounding the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein and so, taking up Ronald Regan's mantle, issued a challenge to Vitra's Chairman Emeritus Rolf Fehlbaum "Mr Fehlbaum! Tear down this wall" we demanded, "Or at least move it a little. Please" And Rolf Fehlbaum listened. And has indeed moved it a little. Thank you!1 However, being a much more enlightened man than us, Rolf Fehlbaum thought further and not only took the opportunity thus created to invite
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As part of the build up to this year's Kortrijk Design Biennale the winners of the Interieur Awards 2014 were announced in Brussels at the end of May. Organised since 1974 the Interieur Award is an inter-disciplinary, international design award open to young designers. Past winners include Jurgen Bey (1990), Maarten Van Severen (1992) and Florian Kallus (2010) For the 2014 edition the Interieur Award was run in two categories "Spaces" and "Objects" The Spaces category called for submissions
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With their high walls, locked gates, uncooperative guards and more video cameras than your average broadcasting company need to cover a simple football tournament in South America, embassies aren't, generally speaking, the most welcoming of places. A small piece of another culture they may be, but never a piece of another culture that appears particularly interested in interacting with the neighbours. To demonstrate that alternatives are possible, that embassies can be a focal point in a
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Since January 2014 Vienna born designer, curator and author Tulga Beyerle has been Director of the Dresden Museum of Decorative Arts - the Kunstgewerbemuseum. Representing a radical shift in policy by the authorities in Dresden, Tulga Beyerle's appointment promises to transform a previously sleepy, conservative, museum into a new centre for contemporary design in Central Europe. The exhibition programme for 2014 is certainly a confident step in that direction, beginning as it has with
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Should the 2014 football World Cup final see Italy meet Brazil that would, arguably, be a more than fitting celebration of the 100th anniversary of Italo-Brazilian architect, artist, designer and author Lina Bo Bardi. However, because football's fickle fate cannot be relied upon the Deutsches Architektur Zentrum, DAZ Berlin are currently staging the exhibition "Lina Bo Bardi - Together", an equally fitting tribute to Lina Bo Bardi and her work. Born in Rome on December 5th 1914 Achillina Bo
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"Do the expressions ‘art or design?’ and ‘art and design?’ still have a meaning? Has the question of an object’s status become obsolete?" asks Paris based designer Robert Stadler in the introduction to the exhibition QUIZ at Galerie poirel in Nancy. Rather than answer the question himself Robert Stadler has teamed up with Alexis Vaillant, Chief Curator at the CAPC Contemporary Art Museum in Bordeaux, to organise an exhibition in which objects from an enviable roster of international designers
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On the evening of Tuesday June 3rd the winners of the 2014 Designpreis Halle were announced at a ceremony in the town's historic Stadtbad public bath. Premièred in 2007 the Designpreis Halle is an international tri-annual design competition which in every edition asks designers to submit entries related to a particular theme. Following on from "Electricity" in 2007 and "Travel" in 2010 the 2014 theme was.... Water. A subject that in the juries opinion was best handled by Cologne based
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For us there is very little that epitomises fakeness better than Bling - bold, flash, arrogant jewellery distracting from the soullessness of the wearer. Or the object if we're talking about hideous bejewelled bottles and the like. For their summer 2014 exhibition Depot Basel invited 12 jewellery designers to present their own interpretation of "Fake" Organised in conjunction with the contemporary jewellery magazine Current Obsession Craft & Bling Bling - Fake presents a collection of
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We can't rule out that our interest in the project zTuA by Hochschule Rosenheim students Marko Steininger, Martin Winkler and Fabian Steiner is a direct consequence of the current situation in the (smow) blog HQ. That our professional opinions are being influenced by personal circumstances. We hope they aren't. But can't rule it out. zTuA is an acronym of "zwischen Tür und Angel" - "between door and hinge" - a nice German idiom that refers either to a necessary urgency, to being in the
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As our more loyal readers will be aware, for us the future is analogue. As ever more aspects of our daily routine are taken over by digital technology, the more time we have to concentrate on the things that matter. And they are all analogue. All. Parallel, open design and open processes will become more important as we all lose the need to be part of a stylised mass and finally comprehend that contemporary industrial production and distribution networks are no longer ecologically or
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What you see used to be what you got. However our modern world offers a plethora of viewing possibilities, and so now what you get is influenced by how you see what you see. To this plethora Berlin based collective Fischer Weidenmüller Unterberg have now added one further option. Without going into too much detail, through a manipulation of LCD projection technology the Clair Obscur project generates an image which is invisible to the human eye. Only the use of a special filter renders the
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Those of you who followed our sadly demised Posterous account - Why Twitter? Why? - will recall our joy at seeing the Bravais Desk by Canadian born, Rotterdam based designer Dana Cannam at the "Thoughts of Home" showcase during Dutch Design Week 2011. A wonderfully charismatic product Bravais impressed/impresses with its obvious functionality and effortlessly reduced form. Equally as effortlessly reduced is the modular tableware system "All of a Piece" developed by Dana Cannam in cooperation
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When in our DMY Berlin 2014 Award preview post we asked "When is a wardrobe not a wardrobe?", the question was a little inaccurate. Technically the correct question should have been, when is a laptop case not a laptop case? The answer however remains the same: When it’s a collapsible linen wardrobe by Academie van Beeldende Kunsten Den Haag graduate Renate Nederpel. While developing a laptop case project Renate Nederpel decided to see what happened when she scaled up the dimensions "a
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We recently attended a very interesting talk from Munich based designer Stefan Diez at the Vitra Design Museum in which, amongst other subjects, he briefly queried why design journalists are happy to write about furniture and accessories, but no one writes about, for example, safety helmets....... Ranger by Joe Engelhard and Michael Schuler for German manufacturer ENHA is, according to the designers, the first ever safety helmet to incorporate a double wall construction principle; thus
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If etymologists are to be believed the name "June" is derived from the Latin word iuniores - younger, so junior - a word that has also given us Juniperus. And Juniperus communis gives us the juniper berries that give gin its magic. And what is an exhibition opening without gin? And so what better month to visit an exhibition opening than June? Our five picks from the new June 2014 offerings features Swiss garden design, Spanish food design, Italian abstract design, Finnish modernist design
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At DMY Berlin 2014 fifteen students from the Fachhochschule Potsdam are presenting the results of the seminar "formHOLZ" Run under the supervision of Professor Hermann Weizenegger formHOLZ explored new possibilities with moulded, formed and otherwise shaped wood and the exhibition at DMY Berlin presents a series of prototypes which demonstrate new possibilities with one of the oldest, and most researched, materials/processes in industrial product design. And ably demonstrates that regardless
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One doesn't have to understand why designers or design institutions do the things they do. You don't always have to be able to follow the logic. Sometimes all you need to do is sit back and enjoy the ride. Such an occasion, at least for us, is the project Lost & Found by Vitra from the Bratislava based design platform Flowers for Slovakia. Essentially the project asked 15 young Slovakian designers to combine forlorn items of traditional Slovakian folk furniture with elements from the Vitra
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As older readers will be aware one of our all-time favourite products is the table family Tints by Jason Miller. Although officially inspired by aviator sunglasses what initially attracted us to Tints, and still holds our famously fluctuant attention, is their unmissable reference to candy. They look like big boiled sweets suspended in a maple frame. Our fascination with the Tint tables isn't however the reason for writing about the lamp Godis by Lund University student Nestor Campos. Even
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"I want to create models for a different society, for a way of producing and living differently", announces Enzo Mari in one of several quotes presented in the exhibition "Who is Mari? at KPM Berlin World. A wonderful example of what can be achieved can currently be explored at DMY Berlin in context of the Berlin based organisation CUCULA. Established in 2013 CUCULA is, as the organisation's full name implies, a craft and design company run by refugees. Or at least all going to plan it
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Events such as Berlin Design Week naturally provide an attractive platform for countries and regions to present themselves and their creatives. Some shows do that very well. Some less so. The exhibition Reset Design - New working models currently showing at the Spanish Embassy Berlin belongs to the first category. Curated by Marcelo Leslabay Reset Design presents ten young Spanish companies, companies all founded in the last three years by designers looking for new ways to produce, market
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With DMY Berlin 2014 up and running the field is open for the 2014 DMY Award. An award that this year has a little extra value given that the trophies have been designed by last years "Young Talent" winner Philipp Weber. And made in Berlin by Berlin Glas e.V. As ever ten nominees have been selected from all exhibitors at this years DMY festival: and from the ten the international jury will select three winners. One of whom will be Dutch. That's not part of the competition rules. Just a
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Since the late 1950s Bavarian porcelain manufacturer Rosenthal has cooperated with an impressive roster of international designers to create new objects and product families, notable cooperations including those with Raymond Loewy, Walter Gropius, Wilhelm Wagenfeld, Jasper Morrison or Patricia Urquiola. One of the firms most recent collaborations is and was with Offenbach am Main based Sebastian Herkner. A graduate of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach am Main, Sebastian Herkner
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Parallel to the exhibition Fernsehgeräte the Neues Museum Nürnberg is also presenting "Unschärfe" - Out of Focus - an installation by Nürnberg architect Matthias Loebermann created in cooperation with students from the Institut für Architektur und Städtebau at the Hochschule Biberach. Whereas fuzziness, blurring and an irritating placing of focus is a tried and tested process in painting or photography - something we demonstrate neigh on daily - in architecture it is a little used phenomenon.
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