Vienna Design Week 2012: Van Bo Le-Mentzel Hartz IV Furniture Workshop @ Wien Museum

Before we pack up our Yurt and leave Vienna Design Week 2012 to move on to design pastures new, a quick mention of the “Hartz IV Furniture” Workshop the Berlin designer Van Bo Le-Mentzel hosted at the Wien Museum.

Originating in 2010 Van Bo Le-Mentzel’s “Hartz IV Furniture” collection is…. well, we’ve never really been that sure.

In essence it is a very good Open Design project, featuring as it does a comprehensive range and mix of objects, all of which can be easily constructed, even by those of us who have trouble doing anything more technical than spreading butter on toast.

Its also a project that has had more than its share of very positive media coverage.

But not a project we have ever really understood. We’ve never really seen the background idea, the motivation, the aim. The point.

Following the workshop we understand a little better.

Van Bo Le-Mentzel studied architecture in Berlin and currently works for a “strategic creative agency” in the German capital.

In 2009/2010 he had trouble putting up a shelf at home, and so to try to convince his then fiancé, now wife, that he wasn’t a complete incompetent he joined a woodworking course at the local Volkshochschule and built his first chair, the so-called 24 Euro Chair. So-called because that is what it cost.

And then, we lose the story a little.

Buoyed by the positive reaction of friends and family Van Bo put plans for the chair online, and people all over Europe started downloading and building it.

We still don’t really understand why Van Bo put the plans online or how people found them.

But he did, they did and then Van Bo started designing and publishing the rest of the collection. With great success.

The only shadow on the project for us is the name . “Hartz IV” is an especially brutal approach to social security/unemployment benefit currently practised in Germany.

As such the name sounds really offensive. Its almost as if he’d called the project “Homeless Stinking Old Man Furniture” or “Refugee Furniture”

It turns out that the name was meant to irritate the likes of us.

Hartz IV is bad, Furniture is good. So Van Bo decided to combine the two. Not just in a provocative project title but much more as a new approach to breaking out of our current consumption heavy society.

“Build More. Buy Less” is the sub-title to the project and Van Bo hopes to inspire through the furniture. Van Bo believes, largely on account of what he himself has experienced, that the process of building the furniture and the feeling of success from having completed it can motivate and inspire across other areas of your life.

Buying things as a path to dependency and social apathy: making your own as a path to self-confidence, creativity and good health.

The “Hartz IV” in the title being a metaphor for the worst situation you could possibly find yourself in, but still one the furniture can help release you from. At least spiritually.

As we say, we still have a few open questions about the Hartz IV Furniture collection, but having listened to Van Bo and experienced the workshop we understand it a lot better.

And no, we didn’t build anything at the workshop.

We’re still working out how to combine honey and butter on toast……

Vienna Design Week 2012: Van Bo Le-Mentzel Hartz IV Furniture Workshop at Wien Museum

Hartz IV Furniture Workshop at Wien Museum. Build your own Berliner Hocker.

Van Bo Le-Mentzel address the participants ahead of the workshop