Much as we tend to shy away from "Designer of the Year" awards, the presentation of German architecture and design magazine A&W's Designer of the Year award is always an early highpoint of the Passagen Cologne Design Week. Principally because it invariably results in a compact yet informative exhibition from and about the selected designer. An exhibition that is perhaps never independent nor critical, but which always provides an accessible overview of the designers oeuvre. Following on from
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As we noted in our post from the exhibition Der entfesselte Blick – Die Brüder Rasch und ihre Impulse für die moderne Architektur at the Marta Herford, the (hi)story of architecture and design is often more about the protagonists you don't know than the ones you do. Such as the pioneering Dutch architect and designer Piet Klaarhamer: an early teacher of and influence on Gerrit T. Rietveld, one of the intellectual forefather's of Dutch modernism, and a man largely forgotten by history. In an
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As any fool know, Germany's most important contribution to art, architecture and design education was established in Weimar in April 1919. However, some three and half years before Walter Gropius welcomed the first students to his Bauhaus college, a further Germanic education institution was established, an institution which just as with Bauhaus took a new, modern, progressive, approach to art, design and architecture education yet an institution which in comparison to Bauhaus is still
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With ever more of our fellow train passengers displaying acute symptoms of over exposure to cheap Glühwein it can only mean that December is upon us. And the end of one the genuinely more enjoyable smow blog years. Indeed its fair to say 2014 was one of those years that makes you consider if its not time to hang up the old travelling socks and seek a more sedate, sedentary, existence. A fitting moment perhaps, but the correct decision? We've a couple of days to decide. And to accompany us
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Such was the quality of the new products we saw during our autumn tour they kept us going well into November; indeed it wasn't until a cold dank Friday in Chemnitz ahead of the opening of the exhibition Andy Warhol – Death and Disaster at the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, that we even realised it was November.
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......and continued over Budapest and on to Berlin - where amongst other delights we partook of the exhibitions Sensing the Future: László Moholy-Nagy, die Medien und die Künste at the Bauhaus Archiv Berlin and Schrill Bizarr Brachial. Das Neue Deutsche Design der 80er Jahre at the Bröhan Museum - and onto Cologne for the Orgatec office furniture trade fair.
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Following on from the relative inactivity of August September saw us wind back up towards the 2014 autumn design festival season. But before everything kicked of in Vienna, we enjoyed the exhibitions Okolo Offline Two – Collecting at the Kunstgewerbemuseum Dresden, Useful Exhibition by Sanghyeok Lee at the DMY Design Gallery Berlin, Alvar Aalto – Second Nature at the Vitra Design Museum and enjoyed a lovely chat with architect Eberhard Lange on the restoration of Egon Eiermann's Wohnhaus
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Nothing scares us quite like January. It wouldn't be so bad if convention didn't insist on the additive progression of the year. If the number could just remain the same we'd be fine with January. But no. Come the first of January comes further confirmation of our inevitable mortality. Thanks January! To comfort us, five particularly promising sounding new design and architecture exhibitions opening in January 2015...... "SYSTEM DESIGN. Über 100 Jahre Chaos im Alltag" at the Museum für
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... had things not continued apace in June. A month which saw us trawl trough Berlin with Niek Wagemans looking for material with which to build a bar for the Dutch Embassy, rub shoulders with some very glamorous individuals at Design Miami Basel and, most importantly, test the new Vitra Slide Tower in Weil am Rhein.
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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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