Browsing in our Pictorial Review archive it appears March 2013 was “a month of travelling: Stuttgart, Chemnitz, Weimar, Dessau….. its amazing we found time to actually write anything…….” And March was 2014 was "....the same. Just replace “Stuttgart, Chemnitz, Weimar, Dessau” with “Frankfurt, Münsingen, Berlin, Weil am Rhein” March 2015 was mainly spent in the office. Did however mean we managed to pen a little more than in previous Marches, including a birthday tribute to Harry Bertoia and
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February 2015 saw us break new ground and make our first visits to Munich Creative Business Week, the magnificently monikered 's-Hertogenbosch in Holland and Ekumfi-Ekrawfo, Ghana. The latter albeit only virtually. Sadly. And Nils Holger Moormann used our pages to call for a revolution......... How We Work, new Dutch Design at the Stedelijk Museum 's-Hertogenbosch Dry-lacquer vessels by Chung Hae Cho, as seen at Tools for A Break - Korean Crafts and Design, Galerie Rieder Munich during
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January being what it is we spent most of the month in Cologne attending the 2015 IMM Cologne Furniture Fair and the parallel Passagen Design Festival. The undisputed highlight of Passagen 2015 for us was the show case MAD ABOUT LIVING – 24 Designers from Brussels, which introduced us to numerous interesting Belgian creatives, and Ateliers J&J, who we feel certain will crop up a couple of times in the course of our review of 2015. In addition we were very impressed by the Objects in Between
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Horribly denigrating as the term "Swedish Grace" unquestionably sounds, it is a well meant phrase coined to refer to the classicist art and design movement that developed in Sweden in the 1920s and 30s: a movement which served as a bridge between the Art Nouveau-esque national romanticism of the early 20th century and the approaching functionalism, and which thus in many respects paved the way for the Scandinavian interpretation of international modernism as so magnificently presented at the
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For the 13th century Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas beauty required a perfect combination of integritas, consonantia & claritas - integrity, harmony, clarity. In a similar vein the 15th century Italian playwright and philosopher Leon Battista Alberti defined beauty as the harmony of all parts in relation to one another, a character in one of his plays extending this idea to proclaim, in answer to a question concerning a woman's' beauty, "She is so beautiful that nothing could be added to her,
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In our 5 New Design Exhibitions for October 2015 post we recommended, amongst other exhibitions, the Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec showcase 17 Screens at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, noting, "There is something very agreeable about the way Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec pop up in the most unexpected places with the most unexpected projects. Not least because, and as a general rule, the more unexpected the location and the more unexpected the project the greater the chance of experiencing something that
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Obviously defining a "Best of" Dutch Design Week, or indeed any design week, is impossible, one can only hope to attempt to collate your personal highlights and thus provide an impression of how you experienced the event: which is exactly what DAD Galerie Berlin are currently doing with a presentation of some their highlights. Our highlight of their highlights is without question the new hanging lamp by Floris Wubben. When we spoke to Floris at his solo Low Tech Crafts exhibition at DAD
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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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December can be a trying month: always having to think of others; always having to patronise bars and restaurants you've spent the rest of the year wishing would return to the parallel hell from whence they came; eating, eating and eating as if trapped in some culinary Groundhog Day. Do yourself a favour, gift yourself a few hours and visit one of the following new design and architecture exhibitions opening in December 2015. We can't guarantee they'll be good, but can guarantee they'll be
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In our post from the Barbican Art Gallery exhibition "The World of Charles and Ray Eames" we noted the disappointing sparsity with which the otherwise excellent exhibition deals with the private world of Charles and Ray Eames. Arguing that understanding the designer is necessary to fully understanding their work. Charles and Ray are sadly no longer with us to directly answer our many questions; however, in the person of Charles's grandson Eames Demetrios we have an excellent alternative.
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The inclusion of a sheet steel bookend amongst our photos from the Grassi Museum for Applied Arts exhibition “Art Déco: Smart, Precious, Sensual” resulted in one or the other queried look in our direction, enquiries after our health and even questions as to if all our other photos were so unusable that, in our desperation, we had been reduced to using a shot of a piece of understatedly painted bent sheet steel. No, no we replied, all was good. As were the rest of our photos. That bookend
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The history of furniture design has an unignorable, if subtle and background, Hungarian accent; Marcel Breuer was one of the driving forces at Bauhaus and through his work with steel tubing, moulded plywood and sheet steel he helped advance ideas of contemporary furniture design, and continues to inspire; Paul László was one of the genuine pioneers of American industrial design and contributed to George Nelson's first Hermann Miller collection in 1948; and while Ernő Goldfinger may be best
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All with an interest in and/or a desire to understand how historicism in architecture, art and design ceded to modernism could do worse than visit Germany this coming winter. Following on from the opening of the exhibitions "Art Nouveau. The Great Utopian Vision" at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg and "The Bauhaus #itsalldesign" at the Vitra Design Museum, the Grassi Museum for Applied Arts Leipzig have now closed the gap with their new exhibition Art Déco: Smart, Precious, Sensual
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By way of an addendum to our 5 New Design Exhibitions for November 2015 post, the Kaiserslautern University of Technology's Architecture Gallery are hosting "Jean Prouvé - vom System zum Haus" - "Jean Prouvé - from system to house" - in which the results of a semester project exploring the construction systems of Jean Prouvé are being presented. Although arguably best known for his furniture designs, a large part of Jean Prouvé's career and energy was spent developing, and indeed
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In the complete interview with Matylda Krzykowski ahead of the Depot Basel exhibition Forum for an Attitude, there is a statement from Matylda which try as we might we simply could not crowbar into our published text: "most people have never visited a design show, art shows yes, but not design shows" It hadn't occurred to us before. But it's true. You don't go to design museums do you? And presumably also not architecture museums! Or certainly not architecture musems if you don't go to
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"I want to make the most simple furniture possible", so described Jean Angelats a.k.a Ateliers J&J his intentions in our recent interview. Intentions he more than underscores with the new objects in Ateliers J&J's 01 Evolution & 02 collections. Now we know there are cynics out there who will be of the opinion that given the acres of column space we've given Ateliers J&J of late it was always certain that we would like the new collection regardless of what it contained. OK. We understand
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We were first introduced to the work of Berlin based designer Uli Budde when we saw his "Reading Table" project at Designers Fair 2010 in Cologne. A delightfully simple object Reading Table combines table top and magazine/newspaper storage space in a manner that is as painfully obvious as it genial. An easily accessible, contemporary object the fact that no producer has seen fit to take it into production is one of those design mysteries which often keep us awake at night. Having begun his
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In our post from the exhibition Art Nouveau. The Great Utopian Vision at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg we stated, with a certain degree of authority, that "No one likes a hippy" The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis obviously do and are celebrating that fact with the exhibition Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia. Subtitled "An Examination of the Radical Art, Architecture, and Design of 1960s & 1970s Counterculture" the Walker Art Center's exhibition promises to explore
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"The World of Charles and Ray Eames" It is inherent in the nature of America's most productive 20th century creatives that there is no "world" of Charles and Ray Eames; there are "worlds" In their new Eames retrospective the Barbican Art Gallery London attempt to combine these worlds into a coherent, comprehensible universe. The World of Charles and Ray Eames @ Barbican Art Gallery London Charles Eames was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1907. Ray Kaiser in Sacramento, California in 1912.
read moreIn our design calender post on the inaugural Memphis Exhibition in Milan we noted that although important for the development of design and architecture, the Memphis group was never that successful commercially. Which is not to say that Memphis furniture wasn't bought and used to furnish homes. According to Artemide co-founder Ernesto Gismondi, who also served as Managing Director of the Memphis trading company, there are, or at least were, two homes furnished exclusively with Memphis. And
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The WA 24 table lamp by Wilhelm Wagenfeld is without question one of the most instantly recognisable pieces of Bauhaus design, so much so that it is often referred to as simply "the Bauhaus Lamp". Designed by Wilhelm Wagenfeld in 1923 the WA 24 was quickly followed by a series of variations on the theme, yet all maintaining the same pared-down grace and uncomplicated functional elegance of the original. Characteristics which can just as easily be applied to Bauhaus itself as to Wagenfeld's
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Among the more interesting and entertaining texts we didn't publish from IMM Cologne 2015 was our post on the showcase "The Journey of Things" featuring works by 6 Berlin and 2 London based designers. It would have been a great text. Had it been published. That it wasn't is one of those mysteries which only those with an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the smow blog can understand. Fortunately for us, and indeed all in or near Berlin in the coming weeks, until October 31st works
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Established in Brussels in 2011 by the French born, Belgian based craftsmen Jean Angelats and Jonathan Renou, Ateliers J&J released their inaugural collection in 2013. Presenting a range of domestic furnishing items crafted from bent tubular steel and solid wood Ateliers J&J's Collection 01 did nothing particularly innovative - and did it with a self-assured grace and composure that raised it far above the average and reminded us all just how enriching honestly conceived, well-proportioned,
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As we've often opined in these pages, design is a way of thinking, not a profession. An opinion we inevitably illustrate with a picture of a chair being used to hold a door open at Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle. But in what do designers actually believe? What are their motivations? Their goals? From where does their understanding of design originate? Why design? Such and similar questions form the core of the Depot Basel exhibition "Forum for an Attitude" which begins in Weil am
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