May may have been slow in the past. May. For aside from DMY Berlin, Fritz Haller in Basel, Niek van der Heijden in Berlin, and Wilhelm Wagenfeld in Bremen we also got to visit Nürnberg and the new archaeology museum in Chemnitz. And so all things considered May 2014 may go down as one of our busiest months ever.....
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According to our pictorial review of March 2013 it was "a month of travelling: Stuttgart, Chemnitz, Weimar, Dessau….. its amazing we found time to actually write anything……." March was 2014 was the same. Just replace "Stuttgart, Chemnitz, Weimar, Dessau" with "Frankfurt, Münsingen, Berlin, Weil am Rhein" It also explains the large number of half-finished drafts from March. Obviously we didn't find time to write everything!
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On one of the very few occasions over the past 12 months when we've put down our axes and stepped, temporarily, back from the coalface of design culture that is the smow blog, we found ourselves on a cool September evening drinking Voll Damm bier underneath Barcelona Design Museum. No, not like that. It was positive. Our hotel was just round the corner and after a hard day on the beach we fancied an urban stroll and subsequently found a nice place to enjoy our Voll Damm against the backdrop
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We recently posted on current research which suggests that not only is sitting for long periods detrimental to our health, but that sport and movement cannot compensate for the negative effects of prolonged sitting. Taking such research as their starting point Amsterdam based architecture/philosophy studio Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances, RAAAF, and artist Barbara Visser created the somewhat polemically titled animation "Sitting Kills" from which they have now developed the installation
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Until February 8th 2015 the Deutsches Architektur Zentrum, DAZ, in Berlin is presenting the exhibition "The Urburb: patterns of contemporary living" Developed by Ori Scialom, Dr. Roy Brand and Keren Yaela Golan The Urburb was Israel's contribution to the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale and aims to place the current state of urban planning and architecture in Israel in context of historical developments. To this end The Urburb features four so-called sand printers - industrial plotting
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Just as it seems that the press conference ahead of the opening of the Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin's new exhibition, "VKhUTEMAS – A Russian Laboratory of Modernity", is approaching its end, yet another, final, question is posed. Martin-Gropius-Bau Director Gereon Sievernich smiles warmly and responds with a very good natured "My, have you all got a lot of questions today!" Yes. Unsurprisingly. Exhibitions, or indeed any form of academic presentation, about the Russian art school VKhUTEMAS
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One of the advantages of having been running our "5 New Design Exhibitions" series for over a year is that we now possess what we can optimistically refer to as an "archive" And looking in that "archive" we discover that for December 2013 we recommended four exhibitions in Germanophone countries and one in Holland. And for December 2014 we're doing the same. It's not deliberate; it is just the case that only museums and galleries in Germany appear to open design and architecture exhibitions
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Until February 22nd the Berlin Gallery Haus am Waldsee is presenting the exhibition "Architectural Utopia Reloaded", a retrospective dedicated to the experimental architecture collective Haus-Rucker-Co. Haus-Rucker-Co - Architectural Utopia Reloaded at Haus am Waldsee, Berlin Established in Vienna in 1967 by the architects Laurids Ortner and Günter Zamp Kelp together with the artist Klaus Pinter, Haus-Rucker-Co principally concerned themselves with the creation of a new understanding of
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Following three years closure and an investment of some four million Euros the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin - Berlin Museum of Decorative Arts - is once again open to the public. In addition to architectural and interior design adaptations and conversions by Berlin based architects KUEHN MALVEZZI and refreshed displays chronicling the development of popular culture since the middle ages, the past three years have also brought the museum a permanent fashion section and new dedicated special
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"The belief that New York needs a Museum of Modern Art scarcely requires apology. All over the world the rising tide of interest in the modern movement has found expression not only in private collections but also in the formation of great public galleries for the specific purpose of exhibiting permanent as well as temporary collections of modern art. That New York has no such gallery is an extraordinary anachronism. The municipal museums of Stockholm, Weimar, Düsseldorf, Essen, Mannheim,
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Given the urban-centric view of the world most of us posses it's all to easy to forget that social and cultural change, and the associated problems, challenges and opportunities they bring, aren't limited to our cities. An exhibition of photographs of the Ostrach valley in Bavaria by local photographer Christian Heumader attempts to reinforce this point. Presented at the Schwäbisches Bauernhofmuseum Illerbeuren near Kempten im Allgäu as part of the Architekturforum Allgäu's LandLuft programme,
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Much as we all like to assume we all know everything there is to know about modernism, and convinced as we all are that we can name all the important protagonists and their key works. We largely can't. We can largely scratch the surface of modernism and name a handful of the best known protagonists and name a few of their better known works. Just how little the vast majority of us truly understand about modernism is currently being laid bare in the exhibition "Der entfesselte Blick – Die
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As already noted, until Friday October 31st smow Cologne are presenting the exhibition Stadt-Land-schafft. Making use of smow Cologne's generous window space and even more generous Waidmarkt frontage, Stadt-Land-schafft presents eight interpretations of urban topology and the conflict/synergy between our natural and our built environments. And so, for example, Aachen based K2 Architekten present the installation Barb[el] which reflects on how city and countryside merge with one another without
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Ask most people what they identify as the central feature in the work of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí and they'll probably mention the abstract Gothic revival forms of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona or the flowing, organic mosaics of Park Güell. Certainly something visual, potentially something decorative. Ask art historian, critic and internationally recognised Antoni Gaudí expert Daniel Giralt-Miracle, and he won't. "The skeleton is the central feature of Gaudí's work, everything else
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In our 5 New Design Exhibitions for October 2014 post we noted the revolutionary construction techniques Ludwig Mies van der Rohe employed in his Villa Tugendhat Brno and Barcelona Expo Pavilion projects from 1929-30; in both cases the roof being fully supported by the outer walls thus freeing the interior walls of their load carrying function and as such allowing for a more open room division. At that time a genuinely new idea. Over thirty years after realising these works Mies van der Rohe in
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"I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers" exclaims Anne Shirley in Lucy Maud Montgomery's 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables, "it would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn't it?" Yes Anne, it would. Yet while Ms Shirley turned her youthful attention to decorating her bedroom with the brightly coloured maple branches so prevalent on Prince Edward Island at this time of year, our joy is found in the new architecture and design exhibitions opening in the
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As we've often noted in these pages, the future will be analogue. That's not to say that we will turn our backs on all our modern technology, but much more as technology takes over ever more aspects of our daily lives and as we understand what technology can do and how best to harness it, not only will we be freed to concentrate on those things which genuinely matter to us but we will have ever more freedom to organise and lead our lives as we want, freed from the conventions and constraints
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Everyone knows Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto. Everyone knows his flowing, free-formed buildings and his moulded plywood furniture. What is there new to learn? What is the point in another Alvar Aalto exhibition. What indeed................................ Born in Kuortane Finland on February 3rd 1898 Alvar Aalto began studying architecture at the Helsinki University of Technology in 1916, graduating in 1921 and established his own architectural practice in Jyväskyla in 1923. In
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As many of you will be aware, among the myriad of things that regularly get our goat, architecture photography is right up there. Architecture photography and the way the modern digital media fawningly reproduce every heavily photoshopped image that lands in their inboxes. The camera does lie. But then it always has, and as we noted in our post from the exhibition New Architecture! Modern Architecture in Images and Books at the Bauhaus Archiv Berlin, even in the days of analogue photography
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On Friday September 26th the Egon Eiermann Society will present the inaugural "Egon Eiermann Chair" Award at a ceremony in the Neue Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche in Berlin. Initiated to recognise those individuals or organisations who have made an especially valuable contribution to the maintenance and preservation of Egon Eiermann's works the first Egon Eiermann Chair will be awarded to Barbara and Eckard Düwal for their restoration of the so-called Wohnhaus Matthies in Potsdam-Babelsberg.
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We've spent a lot of 2014 travelling backwards on trains, racing towards the future with our eyes fixed firmly on the past. We know its a metaphor. We just hope it isn't an omen. Time will, as ever, tell. And with this being late September, the next five weeks will see us travelling backwards through the European design landscape with an unhealthy, and fate taunting, regularity. Our Autumn Tour 2014 begins at Vienna Design Week where, aside from the Passionswege projects, were particularly
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Following the assimilation of the Cooper Union Design Museum in New York into the Smithsonian Institution as the Copper-Hewitt Museum, founding director Lisa Taylor wanted an opening exhibition which reflected and celebrated not only the museum's new status but also its new direction and which visually translated the "philosophy of the Smithsonian Institution's new National Museum of Design"1 To this end in 1974 selected designers and architects, including Richard Saul Wurman, Charles and Ray
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Am Anfang war der Pneu - first there was air - so hypothesised the German architect and master of lightweight construction Frei Otto: a conviction which led him to spend a large part of his career attempting to reduce architecture back to its natural origins and build a permanent structure "constructed" solely from air. And although he never realised his dream of material-less construction Frei Otto did develop a couple of very interesting studies, including the 1971 Arctic City project which
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1989. A year of social, culture and political upheaval whose effects are still being felt today. The Berlin Wall falls. George Bush is sworn in as 41st President of the United States of America. Nirvana release their debut album Bleach. The Poll Tax is introduced in Scotland. The first episode of The Simpsons airs. And while not wanting to over dramatise the situation, yet clearly and deliberately doing just that in the interests of an introduction, 1989 also saw the opening of the Vitra Design
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