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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We're fairly certain most museum curators aren't inherently nocturnal, it is however noticeable that the longer the nights become, the more activity one registers in museums globally. And so with autumn slowly giving way to winter it should perhaps come as little surprise that October 2015 offers such a richness of new design and architecture exhibitions...... Art Nouveau. The Great Utopia at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Germany An important role in the (hi)story of contemporary
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As many of our regular readers will be aware, we don't like food design. We would say "we can't stomach it", however, that would draw more attention to the subject than it could ever deserve. We're particularly wary of Spanish food design, and the connections that invariably raises to some of the most senseless, egoistic and narcissistic episodes in the recent history of cuisine. Even writing that sentence brings us out in a rage. That said, we've long sought a chance to view the exhibition
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One of the biggest problems with Modernism is the name. It was unquestionably modern. Which is why it became known as "Modernism". However, having become Modernism, it remained Modernism, and consequently "Modernism" came to imply something static. Rather than something, well, modern. Nowhere is this problem more visible than in discussions around Bauhaus. Established in Weimar in 1919 Bauhaus would go on to play a central role in shaping those new ideas about art, architecture and design
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These past few months we have made no effort to disguise the fact that one of our favourite discoveries of 2015 has been Brussels based Ateliers J&J. Ever since we saw the studio's work as part of the exhibition MAD ABOUT LIVING – 24 Designers from Brussels during Cologne Design Week we've been obsessing about the tubular steel and solid wood objects which formed their inaugural collection. And now Ateliers J&J are ready to launch their second collection: their challenging second album, as
read moreCelebrated as the salvation of design. Denounced as kitsch. Fresh & invigorating. Vain & hifalutin. A watershed in design history. A passing fad. There are few architecture and design movements that divided opinion quite as much as the works of the Italian group Memphis. Or indeed which continue to divide opinion more than thirty years after their emergence. Although officially launched with an exhibition at the Arc '74 gallery in Milan on Friday September 18th 1981 Memphis can trace its
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In our recent review of contemporary Berlin creativity we noted that one of the problems increasingly being faced by Berlin is that of holding on to the ever increasing number of graduates from the city's many design institutions. Thus it seemed apposite to talk to a recent Berlin design graduate about the reality of life as a recent Berlin design graduate. A recent Berlin design graduate such as Gunnar Søren Petersen. Born and raised in Bonn Gunnar Søren Petersen studied Industrial Design
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