Older readers will remember our post from the opening of the exhibition “Zoom. Italian Design and the Photography of Aldo and Marirosa Ballo” at the Vitra Design Museum back in April 2011. As an exhibition "Zoom" explores the birth of the Italian furniture design myth/legend - a myth/legend established, propagated, and maintained by photos as expressive as they are timeless. In that post we compared the creation of designer furniture legends with the creation of music legends using the example
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One of the defining images of DMY Berlin 2012 was without question Andrea Brena sitting cross-legged on his stand, up to his elbows in brightly coloured material and knitting with his arms. A sight that, as one can imagine, always attracted a crowd as numerous as it was curious. Although outwardly about knitting with your arms, the central theme of Knitted Army is much more about redefining the personal connection between user and object. About reclaiming furniture from the cold, dark cave
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July is famously the month we escape the tight constraints of the professional design circus and head out to annoy design students at their annual end of year shows. Only to come back not only in awe at the quality of some of the works we have seen; but confident in the bright future of the German design community. Whereas our tour traditionally keeps us safely within the confines of the former DDR - this year we're including Stuttgart. Design? Stuttgart? We know. Stuttgart! But lest we
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We were famously first drawn to the work of Belgian designer Tim Baute aka Interror.be via a lamp he showed at Designers Fair Cologne 2010. And his SevenUp, a moody and reduced down chandelier, remains one of our reference products. Tim is however a metalworker by training and so it was good to see him presenting a new steel product range for his debut at DMY Berlin. And although named after the B-2 Bomber, the range doesn't have its origins in the secretive world of military aviation, but
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It's fair to say that until visiting DMY Berlin 2012 the only design object we knew from Rosenheim was Nils Holger Moormann's Volvo. However at Tempelhof Airport the students from the Interior Design department of the Hochschule Rosenheim demonstrated that the southern German town can also produce slightly more contemporary works. On an interesting and nicely varied DMY stand the two highlights for us were the table "T#9" by Rebecca Schmidhuber and the kitchen system "Stangenware" by Nina
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We're obviously not going to claim that dezeen track what we're up to, however.... Hot the heels of our brief, succinct, exploration of the current state of the British design industry, dezeen - the leading UK based design and architecture portal - have teamed up with Hackney Council and curator/critic Beatrice Galilee to organise a day dedicated to design from the London Borough of Hackney. A chance, if you like, to get a feel not only for what is currently happening in the London design
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Until October 31st 2012 Bauhaus Dessau is showing the exhibition "Marcel Breuer – Design and Architecture" Presenting a wide-ranging look at Breuer's furniture and architectural legacy "Marcel Breuer – Design and Architecture" is a product of the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein and is curated by the journalist/curator/lecturer Mathias Remmele. At the exhibition opening we caught up with Mathias Remmele for a quick chat about Marcel Breuer, his work and his influences. (smow)blog: From the
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When all's said and done Marcel Breuer's 1927 Wassily Chair is nothing more than a couple of bits of material stretched over a metal frame. Giandomenico Belotti's 1960 Spaghetti Chair is nothing more than some PVC cord stretched over a metal frame And so on first impressions there is nothing new about "Upholstered Chair" by Jooyeon Lee. Damn those first impressions............... Created as her Diploma project at the Aalto University Helsinki, "Upholstered Chair" is a lounger created from
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Older readers will remember our fascination and admiration for Scolyt by Marco Merkel after we saw it at the UdK Berlin Rundgang 2011. Marco has now developed things a little further, reduced the scale and is presenting the project at DMY Berlin 2012. We're still lovin' it. And not just because of the beauty of the end results. But because of the thinking and process behind the project. We're fairly certain there is absolutely no useful application of the process, other than creating such
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One of the reasons we've never got on well with trends is because ultimately he who shouts loudest is perceived as being the best, most innovative or most important. DMY Berlin 2012 demonstrates that is not the case. While in Hangar 4 the main sponsor screams his marketing budget at full volume; about 40 metres away two FH Potsdam graduates are quietly presenting much more interesting and socially relevant objects. And much as we'd like to proclaim that their minimal, non-intrusive stand
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If we're honest we can't remember if the Vitra Design Museum exhibition "The Essence of Things: Design and the Art of Reduction" has a section devoted to ergonomics. If not, they may need to extend it to include "The Half" by Finnish/Korean design collective Studio Sailing to Mars. Initially developed with musicians in mind, "The Half" is... half a chair Proportionally. Not physically. Through the reduced form the sitter is more or less forced to adopt a more positive posture - one simply
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Egon Eiermann allegedly once began work on a series of coffins for a Berlin funeral company. The series was sadly never realised, but we can well imagine in which direction Eiermann would have gone.... On the Farmer's Creativity by Agri-expo Yunlin stand at DMY Berlin 2012 is an object that approaches the subject with a little more agility. Return by Sa' Bella Design / Sally Lin is an urn. An urn made of recycled paper, the walls of which are impregnated with seeds. As the paper
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One of the real joys of the first few days of DMY Berlin 2012 has been catching up with Stephan Schulz. Not just because Stephan is without question the product designer we know with the healthiest attitude to the whole circus, and as such after a few minutes in his company you no longer fear the workload that lies ahead. But also because we'd been looking forward to seeing his new Domestic Landscape collection. A collection that as the press material so promisingly begins "... transports
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As already stated, DMY Berlin 2012 is hosting not only the Designpreis der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 2012 exhibition but also the jury meeting to decide which entries should be nominated - and as such go forward to the short list from which the winners will be selected. The jury have done their work and until June 10th we all have the chance to not only view all submitted entries. But also disagree with the jury's decisions. It's why jury's make decisions! The first thing to say is that
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144th birthdays aren't occasions all celebrate; however, because Charles Rennie Mackintosh ties in so nicely with so many of the themes we've covered in the past weeks it seems like an occasion we can't ignore. Born in Glasgow on June 7th 1868 Charles Rennie Mackintosh trained as an architect with John Hutchinson before moving to the larger company Honeyman & Keppie following his qualification in 1889. In 1890 Mackintosh was given his first solo project, designing an extension for the back
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Because we know what's coming up at DMY Berlin, we loved this quote from Marcel Breuer that we discovered in connection with the exhibition Marcel Breuer – Design and Architecture at Bauhaus Dessau "The furniture, even the walls of rooms, are no longer solid, monumental, seemingly immobile, or even in-built. They are much more light, open, almost plotted in the room...."1 All will, hopefully, be clear by the end of the week! 1. Marcel Breuer, Das Neue Frankfurt, January 1928. Quoted in
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As part of the 2012 festival DMY Berlin will be hosting a one day symposium-cum-workgroup looking at design education. As regular readers will be aware design education is a subject we often come back to; be it in terms of business education in design schools, questioning the number of design students or looking at opportunities for networking design schools with local communities. It therefore goes without saying that we find the fact that DMY Berlin is staging such an event very
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Much as Gerrit Rietveld's career is publicly reduced down to the Rood-blauwe stoel, so too is it all to easy to imagine Marcel Breuer spent his days doing nothing more than creating chairs and tables from bent steel tubing. Indeed start typing the name "Marcel Breuer" into google and the all-knowing, all-seeing algorithm will only offer you "Marcel Breuer Chair", "Marcel Breuer Wassily Chair" and "Marcel Breuer Biography" as searches. That the public impression of Marcel Breuer should be so
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Parallel to "Gerrit Rietveld – The Revolution of Space" the Vitra Design Museum Gallery is staging an exhibition exploring some of the central themes of the great Dutch modernist's work: experimentation, recycling, working in unison with your materials. Under the title "Confrontations - Contemporary Dutch Design Live", five Dutch design studios will each collaborate with a company from the Basel metropolitan area to develop an object or installation using the respective firm's principle
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Although we know better, sometimes we could almost believe that this blog is planned. In our "Belgium is Design" post from Milan we wrote "Tim Baute from interror was for several years one of the true highlights at Designers Fair in Cologne." And a couple of weeks later in pops the information that he will be making his debut at DMY Berlin. If his new "Stealth" product range will be a highlight remains to be seen. And certainly the competition is tough. New Zealand designer David Trubridge,
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To round off our coverage of the exhibition Bauhaus: Art as Life at the Barbican Art Gallery London we decided to finish where all such exhibitions begin. With the curator. It seems fair. Specifically we spoke with Lydia Yee who, together with Catherine Ince, was responsible for organising the exhibition. With the first conceptual seeds having been sown in 2009, the pair can look back not only on an awful lot of work, but for all on a concentrated, and very exclusive, study of Bauhaus and
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As we've repeated ad nauseam Depot Basel is a project that has interested and excited us since the first show, but is a location that we've never manged to visit. Happily when we were in Weil am Rhein for the opening of "Gerrit Rietveld – The Revolution of Space" at the Vitra Design Museum the smallest of small gaps opened in our schedule, and we seized the opportunity to sneak across the border. Located in a former grain storage building on the site of a former railway freight yard next to a
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Talk to anyone about design and the furniture industry in the UK and you'll quickly come to realise that while the British Isles may be home to an enviable wealth of design talent. It ain't home to that many producers of quality, contemporary furniture. Or at least anymore. Whereas, for example, the early years of "British Design 1948-2012. Innovation in the Modern Age" at the V&A feature regular examples of British produced furniture, the later years are all but bereft of such. Britain
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If your going to organise an exhibition called "The Revolution of Space", there is probably no more fitting location than Frank Gehry's "revolutionary spaced" Vitra Design Museum building in Weil am Rhein. Unless that it is your exhibition happens to be dedicated to Gerrit Rietveld a man whose canon is principally defined by linear, regular, sober forms. Then you might think twice. The Vitra Design Museum have risked the contrast and consequently visitors to "The Revolution of Space" are not
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