In his ca. 75 CE work The Life of Theseus, the Greek biographer, historian and Delphi priest Plutarch notes that the ship with which Theseus returned to Attica having slain the Minotaur in its labyrinth on Crete, "was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place", meaning that over time the ship of Theseus "became a standing example among the philosophers, for the
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August 2024 is Olympics, or at least the first half is. And while, yes, you could stay home and watch events in Paris unfold from the comfort of your sofa and fridge, you could also undertake a little cerebral, contemplative, conceptual, fencing, judo, weightlifting, skateboarding, and/or gymnastics of your own. Go for that inner gold!!! Seek to become a new personal best!!! Our five recommended cultural sporting venues for August 2024 can be found, not in Paris, or at least not directly,
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"The word 'document' which in the last few generations stood, and in many regards still stands for, papers relating to legal matters, such as deeds, contracts, affidavits and certificates, has in present-day professional usage reverted to its original meaning as derived from its Latin origin", opined Lucia Moholy in 1948, "and now applies to spoken, written, printed and other materials, produced and distributed for the purpose of imparting knowledge".1 With Lucia Moholy: Exposures Kunsthalle
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From the Bauhaus Museum Weimar you can see the Buchenwald concentration camp; from the Bauhaus Museum Weimar you can exactly locate the violence and inhumanity of the NSDAP. However from Bauhaus Weimar and Bauhaus Dessau and Bauhaus Berlin locating the NSDAP is a lot less straightforward; from the Bauhauses seeing the NSDAP is not as simple, the view towards the NSDAP being as it is partially hidden, lightly distorted, unfocussed, by the mists of an unquestioned post-War narrative. And that
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Rowac at Berlin Design Week 2024 By the time the Peter-Behrens-Bau was inaugurated in 1917 Robert Wagner’s Rowac Schemel, one of the earliest seating objects crafted from lightweight sheet steel, had been on the market for almost a decade. If it was used in the workshops and offices of the Nationale Automobil-Gesellschaft, NAG, who, at that time, called the Peter-Behrens-Bau home, or by the wider AEG family to whom NAG was a member, and who so defined the industrialisation of the early 20th
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As all around, certainly all around here in Europe, the world blossoms and blooms into life, as colour and variety and vitality abound, it's strange to remember that just a few short weeks ago everything was so barren, monochrome, desolate. Not least in context of the global architecture and design museum community: how hard we had to labour to achieve anything approaching what could justifiably be termed a 'list' of new architecture and design exhibitions. Similarly it's hard to imagine that
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As Letitia Elizabeth Landon so very, very, nearly wrote in 1823, Of all the months that fill the year Give April's month to me, For the architecture and design museums are then so filled, With sweet variety! Our sweet variety in April's month of 2024 can be found in Dessau, Brussels, Rome, Paris and Dresden....... "The Gesture Speaks" at the Bauhaus Museum, Dessau, Germany For all that the Bauhauses were, without question, art and design and craft and architecture, they were also movement;
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"To meet the needs of a living architecture," opined Otti Berger in 1930, "we need clarity about what fabric is, and further, what fabric in space is".1 With the showcase Otti Berger. Weaving for Modernist Architecture the Temporary Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin, allow one to begin to approach appreciations of what both Otti Berger understood as fabric, "and further, what fabric in space is", and in doing so not only enable differentiated perspectives on Weaving and Modernist Architecture but allow
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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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Time was when new architecture and design exhibitions opened every month. Some months more. Some months less. But every month enough for a list. Time was. But time is. And today you'll struggle to find new showcases opening in August and January. If that's a collective decision made by the global museum community, or pure chance, we no know. We can but observe it's existence as an actual thing. Or put another way: we can find, globally, but one, as in 1, new exhibition due to open in
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According to Germanic folklore, "If December is wild with rain, then leave your fields and get thee to an architecture or design museum" Our five locations for escaping the rains of December 2023 can be found in Cottbus, Rome, Maastricht, Tallinn and Zürich....... "Else Mögelin. Ich wollte, gegen alle Hindernisse, weben" at the Brandenburgisches Landesmuseum für moderne Kunst, Dieselkraftwerk, Cottbus, Germany In context of their 2019 exhibition Unknown Modernism the Brandenburgisches
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In context of the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar, that first wide-ranging presentation of the school, its work and its understandings of itself and the world in which it existed, the institute presented with the Haus am Horn by Georg Muche and its interior, furniture, fittings and accessories by the likes of, and amongst others, Erich Dieckmann, Alma Buscher, Otto Lindig, Benita Otte or Marcel Breuer, a synopsis of the prevailing understandings of and positions to domestic arrangements and
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The popular Bauhaus focus, preoccupation, of discussions on creativity in the 1920s very naturally leads to us all ignoring other important protagonists, causes us all, when oft unwittingly, to miss other equally valid, and enjoyable, paths to appreciations of developments in craft, design, technology and our objects of daily use in the early decades of the 20th century, that important, and still very relevant, period where handwork increasingly ceded to industry. With Haël. Margarete
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In July 1969 Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and as Neil Armstrong stepped from the Eagle lunar module he announced it was, "one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind". And inarguably it was. And was. But what has it brought mankind? Apart from an awful lot of conspiracy theories. And an ongoing fascination with space that drives the irrational belief that in the 21st century we urgently require everything which appeared in 1950s and 1960s science fiction comics and films in order
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The return of an old favourite, and no not (smow) introducing, although Welcome Back!!!, but the Rowac-Schemel, the Rowac stool, a work initially launched in 1909 as one of the world's first sheet steel furniture objects, a work that once graced not only innumerable industrial workshops, craft ateliers and educational institutes, but the workshops and ateliers at Bauhauses Weimar and Dessau, a work that became lost in the confusions of post-War eastern Germany. A work returning in 2023, some
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By way of breaking us all gently into 2023 we thought that rather than presenting a list of new architecture and design exhibitions opening in January 2023, we'd provide a list of those exhibitions both up and running in January 2023 and those opening in January 2023. It seemed a civilised and informative approach. An approach that was more empowering, less demanding. An invitation to visit an exhibition rather than defining an obligation to visit an exhibition. If an approach, an invitation,
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We published our first monthly list of exhibition recommendations on November 1st 2013, one of those short, superficial, posts we used to compose, having as we did back then endless time on our hands; and an intervening nine years that means that with this list for November 2022 we are entering our tenth year of helping you advance your cultural education. While being very much aware that the vast majority of you have never visited a single one of the circa 450 new exhibitions we've carefully
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"Everybody, except myself, have used, and admit to having used my photographs ... and often also without mentioning my name", lamented Lucia Moholy in 1956, "everyone – except myself – have derived advantages from using my photographs, either directly, or indirectly, in a number of ways, be it in cash or prestige, or both".1 The photographs in question being of and from the Weimar and Dessau Bauhauses, photos which played, and continue to play, a not unimportant role in mediating Bauhaus to a
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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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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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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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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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"...one only finds warmth of life and sincerity where human nature is allowed to flourish", opined the German designer Erich Dieckmann in 1931, "one shouldn't forget that in our apartments. Let's treat our contemporary homes to something humane. Something unelaborate, something provisional, with some leeway and space for things to grow as they wish over time."1 With the exhibition Chairs: Dieckmann! The Forgotten Bauhäusler Erich Dieckmann, the Kunststiftung des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt and
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"Exhibiting means selecting, emphasising, demonstrating as a model or an example", wrote Klaus Wille in his 1960 Diploma thesis at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm, continuing that, "the object is information. This information can be used for didactic, commercial or representative purposes. Aimed at individuals as consumers of products and ideas, the exhibition is used to educate, canvass and represent, to influence people, to get them to react in certain ways."1 The exhibition HfG Ulm:
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