Just a few short years ago, whereby given the timescales involved one could convincingly argue just a few short hours ago, coal looked very much like yesterday's resource as the international community, or at least a sizeable part of it, promised to move away from coal and embrace novel fuels. A commitment to a move away from coal, and fossil fuels in general, that recent geopolitical and economic developments have stalled; have led the international community to move away from their
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What is a school? A question in Dessau all too often answered in architectural terms. And while the space in which a school exists is not irrelevant, what is a school? For the 2022 edition of the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau's Bauhaus Lab the participants concerned themselves with education in apartheid era South Africa, considerations which took them far beyond the school room, and far beyond South Africa; and the results of which are presented in the exhibition Doors of Learning: Microcosms of a
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Moormann A Nils Holger; An Autodidact; A Restlessness As the Wackeldackel of Sylt solemnly records, following generations of rule under the rational, steady, unemotional, if autocratic, hand of The Order of the Gute Form, there arose in the lands of the contemporary former West Germany a challenge to that long-established rule through a poorly organised, but on account of that all the better networked, collective of young designers who questioned not only the zealous worshipping of the
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Autumn is once more upon the Northern Hemisphere, that season of not only "mists and mellow fruitfulness", but as a John Keats also reminds us the season of harvest, be that vine fruits, apples, gourds or hazelnuts. Or the architecture and design exhibitions Keats didn't mention. If, to be fair to him, they would have been largely unknown in 1819. Unlike today; a today where after a long summer of waiting patiently, of observing from afar, and hoping, autumn traditionally presents a bountiful
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In 1947 the American designer Edward J Wormley reflected in the New York Times on what contemporary furniture could, should, be, and amongst his thoughts on beds, chairs, storage units et al, opined that "an ideal table would be a flat plane suspended in space", and that not least because "it's the legs that are the big nuisance". "Can we find this kind of furniture in today's market?", he asked his readers, albeit, rhetorically, "You know we can't."1 Which tends to imply Wormley didn't visit
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Amongst the many developments that have influenced and informed the path of furniture and interior design in the past 120ish years one must, without question, count developments in context of colour. Whereas in previous centuries colours were limited in their availability, range and durability, recent decades have seen not only progress in that availability, range and durability, and as such ever more possibilities in our use of colour, but also seen increasing study of psychology and colour
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"For men who have to write a lot, and over prolonged periods, a desk at which they can work standing up is an indispensable piece of furniture for altering their posture and for maintaining their health", opined Journal der Moden in May 1786. An age when, famously, only men wrote. Yet advantageous and positive as standing to write was, prolonged standing could, as Journal der Moden notes, lead to tiredness. A solution was however at hand for all who preferred working at a standing height desk
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In September 1839 Henry David Thoreau and his brother John spent two weeks navigating the Concord and Merrimack rivers on the Massachusetts/New Hampshire border. A boat trip, a journey, motivated by Thoreau's long time observation of the Concord river, and for all its many organic and inorganic inhabitants, floating past him, "fulfilling their fate" as they did; and which inspired Thoreau to "launch myself on its bosom and float wither it would bear me."1 Which is not only a very positive
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In Poetics Aristotle argues poetry arose on account of two intrinsic human instincts: an "instinct for 'harmony' and rhythm" and "the instinct of imitation", as in representation rather than copying, an imitation Aristotle opines is the method via which humans learn, and that "to learn gives the liveliest pleasure". Yet while for Aristotle all forms of poetry are "in their general conception modes of imitation", again as in representation rather than copying, "they differ, however, from one
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In their 2021/22 exhibition Craft is Cactus the Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt, constructed a very convincing argument for including craft in the cactus family, a very convincing argument for making the Craftoideae a fifth subfamily of the Cactaceae. Yet while a very good argument, as we all know, much work remains to be undertaken on the classification of the Craftoideae, not least in context of their habitats: where does one find craft? Where do the Craftoideae prevail? With the
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Arguably there is no museum permanent collection exhibition more painstakingly, fastidiously, organized than that of the Werkbundarchiv - Museum der Dinge, Berlin: what initially resembles a hurried attempt to cram as much as possible into as few vitrines as possible, reveals itself on closer, more careful, inspection as vitrine after vitrine of disparate everyday objects organized according to a wide variety of characteristics and properties, such as, for example, objects formed from specific
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Summer Break!!! Not us!!! We're still here, tirelessly toiling to provide the fuel to keep your fires of inquiry burning bright and thereby powering your ongoing exploration into the depths and breadths of design. And your deconstruction of the simplifications, half-truths and objectifications that have become popularly confused for design. But the international architecture and design museum community have collectively decided not to open any new exhibitions in August 2022. We're not
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Le Klint A Phaesporia; A Fonden; A Pleat As the ancient runes and paintings within the Caves of Lego record, during a period of great darkness in the lands of the contemporary Denmark one Peder Vilhelm det Klint, more commonly recorded as PV, a sage of fundamental importance to the development of furniture in the contemporary Denmark, a sage, legend records, hewn from Møns Klint on the sacred isle of Falster and blessed with the ability to see into the past and into the future in the same
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For all that the (hi)story of architecture and design is one staged against a background of economic, social, environmental, cultural, et al evolutions and developments, it is also a (hi)story fundamentally dependent upon developments and evolutions in materials, and also in the development and subsequent evolution of novel technologies. Novel technologies and materials which not only enable new approaches to the construction of our buildings and the manufacturing of our objects of daily use,
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For reasons too well understood to need mention here, the last couple of summers largely passed by without design school end of year exhibitions, or at least not in the manner and with the public accessibility we all once enjoyed and cherished. And as an inevitable consequence, our Campustour came to a grinding halt. Summer 2022 sees the return of the universal end of term exhibition. But not of the Campustour. Not that we've lost our passion for randomly traversing Europe, consuming
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Against the background of an ongoing climate emergency, rising nationalism, ever more politically active religious fanaticism of all hues, a Covid pandemic that refuses to go quietly, the return of War to Europe, amongst a great many other contemporary existential ills, there are a myriad questions we'd all rather be asked than if you believe in the future? We'd all like to believe, but, well.......hhhmmm....... you know....... The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg however considered the
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July 2021 marked what would have been the 100th birthday of Karl H. Bröhan, initiator of the collection that initiated Berlin's Bröhan Museum; a centenary marked by the museum with the exhibition Bröhan Total!, a, as the title implies, comprehensive presentation of that collection. A presentation of the Total! Bröhan collection, an intensive examination, and study, of the Total! Bröhan collection by the Bröhan Museum which, indirectly and directly, led the Bröhan Museum to undertake, if one so
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As we all know, the key to reading is learning your ABC. Once you've learned the letters, and combined them in simple words, you can approach more complex words, then sentences, paragraphs, essays and finally let that which you read discourse with your observations and experiences to help you better develop your understandings and appreciations of the world around us and those with whom we share it. But can learning the ABC of a designer help us to better approach understandings and
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"One day in the midst of a burning July, When meadows were parched and the rivulets dry, A cluster of Bees in extreme....... anticipation, Flew towards...... a design exhibition"1 (With apologies to Sara Coleridge) Our five welcoming, stimulating, retreats for bees, or anyone or anything, from the parching burning of July 2022 can be found in Munich, Metz, Tulsa, Vienna and Bordeaux....... "The Olympic City of Munich. Retrospect and Outlook" at the Architekturmuseum der TU München, Germany
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"Reinforced concrete is the best constructional material yet devised by mankind", enthused the Italian civil engineer Pier Luigi Nervi in 1956.1 A position Nervi spent a circa sixty year career arguing for, both in innumerable texts and through a canon of varied, and varyingly challenging, constructions throughout Italy, and much further afield. And in doing so Pier Luigi Nervi not only helped advance a popular acceptance of reinforced concrete as a construction material, but also helped
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Monographic exhibitions portraying designers from ages past, generally, only leave you with but little opportunity to directly assess, compare and contrast that designer in context of their time. The, desired, concentrated focus on the protagonist leaving you, by necessity, not least by necessity of limits of time and space, primarily relying on those snippets of information and/or blurry images of objects, invariably popularly celebrated objects, your brain can recover in that moment, for any
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Knoll A Wilhelm; A Walter; A Willy; A Hans; A Florence; A Lineage Although research into its ancestry is still very much ongoing, the wild Knoll, Knoll furniturus, is popularly believed to have originated in the region of the contemporary Stuttgart; what is certain is that it was in the contemporary Stuttgart that Knoll furniturus was first domesticated as Knoll wilhelmus, a Knoll typified by its leathery character and whose most successful cultivation was unquestionably in conjunction with
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With the Boötids, the Arietids and the Beta Taurids June is an eventful month for meteor showers; and a month of great promise for all those who hope their most earnest wishes for the future will be fulfilled through entrusting them to a shooting star. If only their wasn't the seemingly endless wait for nightfall, the seemingly endless sitting and streaming and snacking and stupor of waiting....... Alternatively, use the day(s) ahead of the arrival of those celestial messengers of hope in
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"It is possible to live without taking colours in daily life seriously just as it is possible to live and to ignore music, sculpture and other arts" opines the textile designer Bernat Klein in his 1965 book Eye for Colour, and thereby not only freely equating colour with other cultural goods but also very neatly setting up the refutal, "no one will doubt, however, that life will be fuller and richer if colours are daily absorbed, handled and savoured as they can and should be".1 Eye for Colour
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