The Augenwohl felt lamp by Dorothee Becker for Design M from the early 1970s, as seen at Dorothee Becker – aus dem persönlichen Nachlass, Passagen Interior Design Week Cologne 2024 Born in Aschaffenburg, Bayern, on March 30th 1938 into a family of small traders, her mother's family running a butchery, her father operating a drugstore, Dorothee Becker enjoyed, a, by all accounts, happy, comfortable, childhood on the Bavarian/Hessen border, if an early biography that is still to be fully told.
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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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Chemical Connection by Karoline Fesser (in cooperation with Karl Weber), as seen at Siebter Himmel, Passagen Interior Design Week 2024 We're sure Karoline Fesser won't mind us observing that she is a seasoned regular at Cologne's Passagen Interior Design Week, having made her debut in, by our calculations, 2012; and if you do mind Karoline, sorry! But, we've gone done it now! Yet despite the regularity of her appearances, there is never a sense of déjà vu, never that dull lifeless in a room
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Since 1990 the annual IMM Cologne furniture fair has been accompanied by the Passagen Interior Design Week. A design week, a design festival, that, and although it is often a bit overly commercial for our tastes, also always features a nice mix of emerging and establishing designers, small platforms, design schools, and others removed from the more predictable, superficial, profit-orientated corners of the furniture and design industries. A mix of creatives who help remind what design, what
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For popularly understood reasons not only did the 2021 edition of the IMM Cologne furniture trade fair not take place as planned in mid-January, neither did the 2021 edition of Cologne's Passagen Interior Design Week..... ....which doesn't mean that fresh contemporary design wasn't to be found in Cologne in mid-January. In an offline realised and online presented exhibition the assemblage Generation Köln introduced the results of their collaborations with the CIAV Meisenthal glassworks; a
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In our post from the exhibition Design Gruppe Pentagon at the Museum Angewandte Kunst Cologne we noted that Gallery Pentagon was laterally based in Cologne's Bismarckstrasse. Bismarckstrasse 50 to be precise, a former cardboard packaging factory which in the 1980s was developed into spaces for creatives of various ilks..... .....Bismarckstrasse 50 is still home to creatives of various ilks, and is still home to a gallery, Galerie Martina Kaiser, where in context of the 2020 Passagen Interior
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Within any regular pentagon one can locate, in numerous, manifold, relationships, the Golden Ratio, that centuries old guarantor of harmony, balance, beauty.... And within an irregular Pentagon? With the exhibition Design Gruppe Pentagon the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Cologne search for an answer in context of the 1980s Rheinland design quintet....... Design Gruppe Pentagon, Museum für Angewandte Kunst Cologne Established, more or less, formally in Cologne in 1985 by Gerd Arens, Wolfgang
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Fortune, we are told, favours the brave. Misfortune the reckless, but fortune the brave. Thus, summing all the bravery we could muster, we descended into the unknown of the Bunker am Bahngleis and the exhibition Generation Köln.....* Karoline&Klemens&Thomas&Tim. Generation Köln @ Passagen Cologne 2019 As noted in context of Generation Cologne 2018, we're not huge fans of generic umbrella terms such as "Generation", finding them not only distracting and counter productive, but also
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How many stories can a city tell? There are the public, collective, communal stories told by its buildings, by its peoples, by its industries, by the development of its cultural institutions and through the actions of famous/infamous citizens; but there are also the myriad private, individual stories, the scurrilous, the appalling, the romantic, the comic, the tragic, the improbable, and of course the secret, whispered, ones. At the risk of sounding like a city marketing platform, a city is
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With a new name, but a familiar format, the 2018 Kölner Design Preis once again celebrates the city's design students and creative colleges, including an exhibition of all nominated projects in the Cologne Museum für Angewandte Kunst. 1st Prize: Unfolding Space by Jakob Kilian (KISD), as seen at Kölner Design Preis/Toby E. Rodes Award 2018 Exhibition, MAKK Cologne Inaugurated in 2007 the Kölner Design Preis/Toby E. Rodes Award is a by-nomination award, every creative college in Cologne
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Derived from the French parcourir, the parcours is perhaps historically most popularly associated with equine show-jumping, the challenge of negotiating an artificial obstacle course; more recently it has become popular in context of human show-jumping, the challenge of negotiating an urban obstacle course. Approaching the Köln International School of Design 2018 KISDparcours semester and graduation exhibition we hoped the obstacles to be negotiated would be of the mental, philosophical,
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As regular readers will appreciate, we're no great approvers of lumping individual creatives together under one umbrella term; always strikes us as being an unnecessary distraction, and (more than) a little counterproductive. We are however most appreciative that following an inaugural presentation at Kazerne Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week 2017, the showcase Generation Köln is now being presented, as it were, on home turf. Generation Köln. A Family Portrait Organised by Passagen
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As in art, music or literature, the path in design from an idea to its realisation is rarely straight. And not always achieved. Or at least not immediately. Consequently every designer, as with every artist, every musician or every author, has projects which began their journey's full of hope,but, then, for whatever reason....... With the showcase "in Arbeit" Cologne based designers Thomas Schnur and Klemens Grund present some of their projects which are, still, "in Arbeit" In Arbeit.
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One of Germany's leading post-war architects and architectural theoreticians, Egon Eiermann was also one of post-war Europe's most important chair designers, not just in context of what he realised, but also in context of what he worked towards realising and the reasons why. With the exhibition Cologne celebrate that legacy. Der Stuhl des Architekten - Sitzmöbel von Egon Eiermann @ Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft Cologne Although Egon Eiermann's career as a designer of
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Algorithms as dance, a tactile architecture guide and a future-proof flat sharing platform. On Thursday October 26th the winners of the 2017 Kölner Design Preis were unveiled at a ceremony in the city's Museum für Angewandte Kunst, MAKK; and where until Sunday November 19th the three winning, and all nominated, projects, can be viewed in a specially conceived Kölner Design Preis 2017 exhibition. Kölner Design Preis 2017 exhibition at Museum für Angewandte Kunst Köln, MAKK Celebrating its
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With the exhibition 5 Years kaschkasch Florian Kallus and Sebastian Schneider aka studio kaschkasch celebrate, well, five years of studio kaschkasch. 5 Years kaschkasch, Cologne 5 Years kaschkasch The foundations for kaschkasch were laid by Florian Kallus and Sebastian Schneider in context of a joint graduation project at the Akademie für Gestaltung Münster, and became reality with the opening of their own studio in Cologne in 2011. An early diet of trade fairs and competitions resulting in
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Continuing our series of posts on creativity in Cologne, historic and contemporary, we met up with product designer Felix Stark. Born in Bonn Felix Stark initially completed a carpentry apprenticeship before studying product design at the ecosign/Akademie für Gestaltung in Cologne, where in 2004 he established his design studio "formstark". In addition to realising projects as varied as, and amongst many others, the ARK tap and bathroom fittings collection for Spanish manufacturer Stanza, a
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An important commercial, financial and administrative centre since the middle ages Cologne has contributed greatly to the development of European society, culture and politics, while with the Kölner Dom the city is home to not only one of the largest Gothic cathedrals in Europe, and thus one of the most important religious institutions on the continent, but posses an excellent example of logical, considered, coherent, urban planning: by building the cathedral on a raised platform directly next
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We first became aware of Florian Kallus and Sebastian Schneider a.k.a design studio kaschkasch before they were kaschkasch, when they were just Akademie für Gestaltung Münster students Florian Kallus and Sebastian Schneider. Our first contact with Florian was when we saw his project "Table & Lamp" at DMY Berlin 2010. Nothing more complicated than a table, or technically a desk, with a freely positionable and directable lamp attachment, "Table & Lamp" is and was one of those projects that
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Cologne isn't a city which creativity only visits every January in the form of the IMM Cologne furniture trade fair and the Passagen interior design week, but is a city in which creativity can be experienced all year round: and no we don't mean Carnival! We definitely don't mean Carnival! Rather genuine creativity of the sort that enriches, advances, challenges and entertains. In addition to being home to seven creative colleges, including the Köln International School of Design, KISD, the
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In our post from the exhibition Schrill Bizarr Brachial. Das Neue Deutsche Design der 80er Jahre at the Bröhan Museum Berlin we noted that, for us at least, the greatest legacy of the 1980s post-modern neuen deutschen Design movement is and was the number of protagonists who have subsequently found teaching positions in Germany's leading design schools; protagonists such as Wolfgang Laubersheimer who since 1991 has been Professor of Production Technology at, and since 2013 Director of, the Köln
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