Much as design is a child of the late 19th/early 20th century so to is childhood, or perhaps more accurately so to is childhood as it is understood today. With the exhibtion Design for Children the Bröhan Museum, Berlin, explore the relationships between design, children and childhood over the century and a bit of their co-existence....... Design for Children, Bröhan Museum, Berlin For all that childhood is an unavoidable phase of every human life, over a great many centuries its was,
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Grassimesse Leipzig 2024 Compact: Aleksander Rasztawicki - Leichtigkeit 'Do we still need wood, metal and plastic?' asks Hochschule Wismar graduate Aleksander Rasztawicki in context of his Diploma project Leichtigkeit, Lightness. A rhetorical question for Aleksander doesn't believe that we necessarily do. For Aleksander all we need is paper. Or more accurately all we need is vulcanised fibre, a material first patented in 1859 that is produced from cotton via a process which, in many
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Budapest Design Week 2024 Compact: Alfréd by Szebedy Vajk When we first approached Alfréd by University of Óbuda student Szebedy Vajk at 360 Design during Budapest Design Week 2024 we interpreted it as an abstracted giraffe. It certainly wouldn't be the first time an animal had served as the basis for a piece of furniture design. Indeed shortly after meeting Alfréd we met the giraffe-esque library ladder 3½ by vondingen at Grassimesse Leipzig. Others would at this point speak of a t****
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Grassimesse Leipzig 2024 Compact: vondingen As discussed with Grassimesse Project Manager Sabine Epple, in order to stage Grassimesse during Covid it was necessary to place exhibitors in the permanent exhibtion spaces by way of guaranteeing the legally required distancing. A concept that exhibitors and visitors very much took to and which thus has continued post social distancing reality, and that very much not only to the agreement of exhibitors and visitors but to the benefit of the
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Grassimesse Leipzig 2024 Compact: Faculty of Angewandte Kunst Schneeberg - Me and My Chair The exhibition A Chair and You at the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig, may have ended but its traces can still be felt at Grassimesse 2024, being staged as it is to a large degree in the A Chair and You scenography. Or more accurately the A Chair and You colour and atmosphere scheme, the more extreme elements of Robert Wilson's scenography having been removed. And the soundtrack in the
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Grassimesse Leipzig 2024: smow-Designpreis Winner - Nadja Schulze Following on from the co-winners of the inaugural Grassimesse smow-Designpreis Hevesi Annabella/Line and Round and Cornelius Réer the winner of the 2nd edition is Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule, Halle, Interior Architecture Masters student, Nadja Schulze for her lighting projects LiLa, Bow and 360°. The latter a wall mounted lamp, family of lamps, that can be rotated through, well... 360°. A rotation that not only results
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The 2024 Grassimesse Leipzig jury have two important tasks: selecting from the myriad international applications received those creatives entitled to exhibit within the exhibition halls of Leipzig's Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, and thereby maintaining the ongoing quality claim of the Grassimesse in context of contemporary craft, design and applied art, and awarding amongst those selected exhibitors six of the seven Grassi Prizes.* Their first task was completed in late summer. Their
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In these dispatches we've oft and long and deep reflected over the (hi)story of, and contemporary reality and relevance of, the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig's annual Grassimesse. So no need to repeat ourselves here, just an urgent need to get to Leipzig and the 2024 Grassimesse with its promise of not just some 78 exhibitors from 8 nations across a wide range of contemporary craft, applied art and design genres, but also, and amongst other specials, a showcase of Ukrainian
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While the rest of the international design museum community retreat from the warmth of the summer sun, taking shelter in the cool of their depots and archives, Leipzig's Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst are busy preparing for one of its annual highlights: Grassimesse. A craft, applied art and design fair instigated in 1920 which has witnessed, and survived, the highs and lows of the past century in Leipzig and environs. And which since 1920 has been by invitation only: anyone and everyone can
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Wellen, Wogen, Wirbel. Water as a source of inspiration, Galerie Handwerk, Munich Water, as we all know, is that compound without which life on earth simply wouldn't be physically possible. And a compound that, as discussed from, for example, Water Pressure. Designing for the Future at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, has an importance and relevance for human society that goes far beyond the physical of its life giving properties. Important and relevant as the physical of its life
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Earth Centered Design. An Exhibition, Hochschule München, Munich Creative Business Week 2024 In context of Tsuyoshi Tane's Garden House project on the Vitra Campus, long-year Vitra CEO Rolf Fehlbaum opined that in the immediate post 1939-45 War decades "the industrial idea of taking over nature without caring was very typical". And arguably not just then. As discussed in context of, for example, At the coalface! Design in a post-carbon age at the Centre for Innovation and Design at
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Badekarren in Katwijk by Wilhelm Gutmann, 1908 (Image Public Domain, courtesy of Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main) ... ... Wilhelm Gutmann used the occasion of Grassimesse Leipzig 1920 to present...... .......we no know. Or more accurately, in terms of Wilhelm Gutmann generally we no know hardly nothing. Certainly we no know an awful lot more than the we no know about the other Grassimesse 1920 designers featured thus far in these dispatches. Despite the fact that, arguably, there should
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A living room design by Gertrud Lincke featuring two Arbeitskojen, Work Bunks/Berths, on the left and right, home office à la the 1920s (undated, but before 1927, possibly 1924/5) In 1926 the Dresden based architect Gertrud Lincke will opine that "women are decisive, paramount, when it comes to setting up a home", and that not because of what you think, but because, "they are the most negatively impacted by the housing crisis and all that comes associated with it". However, she will lament
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An (early) interior (and possibly early furniture) by Dr Josef Frank, undated, but before 1915 "Living rooms intended to serve more than purely representational purposes are not works of art or well-coordinated harmonies in colour and form, whose individual components (wallpaper, carpets, furniture, pictures) comprise a finished whole in which they are inextricably linked", opined Dr Josef Frank in 1919, and that not least because, "any new item added would be perceived as awkward,
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Chairs by Elisabeth von Baczko realised by Korbmacher Kapsch, Bremen Just a few short years ago Dr. Karl Schaefer, the new Director of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne, opined that furniture and interior design required "a clear, well-disciplined architectural appreciation for the corporeal and its dimensions, for the tectonic and for the material, a certain dryness and an unapologetic sincerity" and for all "penetrating, deliberative understanding more than unbridled fantasy",
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After several years of preparation, and a lot of, at times (very) heated, discussion, this past March saw the staging of the inaugural Grassimesse Leipzig in the city's Rathaus. Instigated by Dr. Richard Graul, Director of the Leipzig Kunstgewerbemuseum by way of a response to, an answer to, the increasing concerns amongst many professional creatives regarding the quality of contemporary objects of daily use presented at the bi-annual Leipzig Fair, for all the quality of the novel machine
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As Europe begins to ardently shake of the last remnants of winter and the first green and blue and yellow and white specks appear in parks and gardens, as the chance that summer might just arrive becomes tangible.... October can seem a mighty long way away. Unimaginable. But it is approaching. As is the 2024 Grassimesse. The path thereto has been laid and until Wednesday May 15th are all called upon to apply....... Staged in and by the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig, and
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Born in Coburg, Franken, in 1961 Cornelius Réer took his first steps in the world of glass via an apprenticeship at Glashütte Süßmuth, Immenhausen, near Kassel, followed by periods working in Austria and Sweden and a nine month course at Brierley Hill Glass Center in Dudley, England, before returning to Franken and establishing his own studio in Fürth in 1992. If a return to Franken punctuated by long absences: the next 11 years seeing Cornelius lead an, essentially, nomadic life, travelling
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Beetlechair by Alexander von Dombois, as seen at Passagen Interior Design Week Cologne 2024 There is an argument to be made, indeed one we will make here without offering any evidence, we'll save that for another day, there is an argument to be made that some of the earliest forbearers, if not the earliest forbearers, of our contemporary side chairs were three legged: the three-legged stool is an object known across time and geography and class, and there is a particularly satisfying,
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"Why are you studying in the pottery?", enquired Paul Klee of Else Mögelin in 1921 after seeing her paintings of the village of Dornburg, home of the original Bauhaus Weimar pottery workshop, "these watercolours look as if they are designs for tapestries". With Else Mögelin. Ich wollte, gegen alle Hindernisse, weben the Brandenburgisches Landesmuseum für moderne Kunst, Cottbus, explain and explore what happened next, and thereby help introduce an interesting and informative, if all too
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Line and Round, I O, was established in Budapest in 2017 by Annabella Hevesi, a Masters graduate from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design and Gábor Bella, a Masters graduate from the "School of Life", with a background in carpentry and numerous years experience in a variety of construction/interior/design fields, including the creation, development and realisation of escape room games, a concept that enjoys a particular popularity in Hungary, and in which context Annabella and Gábor
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3D printed ceramics by Babette Wiezorek, as seen at Grassimesse 2023, Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig For all that a Wilhelm Wagenfeld is popularly known as one of the more craft orientated designers of the early 20th century, he was no adherent to 'tradition' as understood as doing that which has always been done, and was no adherent of, no fan of, craft as an unchanging practice, railing against those who practised craft as such as participants in a "Maskentanz", a Masked Ball, a
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Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle - Faserland oder 8mm und 100% Bio, Grassimesse 2023, Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig Cutting straight to the chase, in our post from the Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle Jahresausstellung 2023 we noted "as ever we may have missed things, in fact we know we did": the project Faserland oder 8mm und 100% Bio was that thing we knew we'd missed. Whereby we still don't know where it was hidden, for we can't remember a single square centimetre
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The H2L lounge chair by Studio Machwerk, as seen at Grassimesse 2023, Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig One of the joys of Grassimesse is that it has never been about big names and star turns, anyone and everyone can apply. All you have to do is convince the jury you deserve to be there. As newbies Studio Machwerk did. And did. Established in 2022 (possibly 2023, yes, we've forgotten, but certainly not before 2022) by Christopher (Ebert) and Josef (Ehnert), both graduates of the Faculty
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