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.
read more
......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.
read more
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
read more
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
read more
August being holiday month our principle focus was board sports: Woody Skateboards for the summer and silbærg snowboards for the coming winter. And when not trying to dislocate our virtual collarbones we found time to bring you an interview with Daphna Laurens and a warning from the colleagues at smow Australia.
read more
Thanks to a unnecessarily long journey through Sachsen-Anhalt in an unnecessarily warm bus, July 2014 will remain indelibly scorched in our collective memory. On a professional note, July 2014 also saw the exhibitions Unter Zwischen im Ampelhaus, Oranienbaum and Summer Break VA / Neue Arbeiten at Direktorenhaus Berlin, and of course the flood of student exhibitions that arise every summer.
read more
... 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.
read more
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.....
read more
As all old thesauruans know "April" is merely a synonym for "Milan" And lo despite all promises to the contrary April 2014 once again found us in Lombardy, where, amongst other objects and exhibitions, we were very taken with the Alexander Girard reissues revealed by Vitra, the exhibition of Meisenthal Glassworks at the Institut Francais and the new Rival chair by Konstantin Grcic for Artek. Away from Milan April 214 saw us get to know the work of Pascal Howe at the DMY Design Gallery Berlin,
read more
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!
read more
Whereas in years past we would have just blithely stated that January, as ever, saw us in Cologne for IMM Cologne and the Passagen design festival. January 2014 saw in context of the Passagen deign week the first in-store exhibition in the smow Cologne store: Facetten - a presentation devoted to domestic uses of the USM Haller modular furniture system. Elsewhere in Cologne we were very taken with Objects and the Factory, Design Flanders and Alle Metalle / All Metal. In addition January 2014
read more
As many of you will be aware, for us no post about 20th century American design is complete with the addition of alcohol and George Nelson. And so by way of a reprise to our recent post celebrating Isamu Noguchi's birthday, we present, with thanks to Stanley Abercrombie's ever excellent and easily recommendable George Nelson biography, George Nelson's recollections on Isamu Noguchi and his role in the creation of the famous Ball Clock. An anecdote that in addition beautifully highlights the
read more
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
read more
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
read more
Explaining the background to their contribution to Stylepark's Being Home 4+4 installation programme at Orgatec Cologne 2014 Marcel Besau and Eva Marguerre a.k.a. Besau Marguerre stated their belief that the best ideas rarely strike at the desk and that, and in particular in a home office context, any space is a potential work space. The garden, for example. On the balcony. In the dining room. Or in the kitchen. And so why not take the kitchen into the office. So, or similar, is possible
read more
Whereas the vast majority of successful and popular furniture designers have an architecture or handcraft background, there are naturally exceptions. One of the best known and most fascinating being without question the sculptor and artist Isamu Noguchi. Born on November 17th 1904 in Los Angeles as the first and only child of the American writer Leonie Gilmour and the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, the young Isamu was raised in Japan until 1918 when he was sent to the Interlaken boarding school
read more
Despite the transient nature of the definition of "design", an important role of the designer is unquestionably solving problems. And an important role of the industrial designer is solving problems in context of industrial production. One of the earliest, and most elegant, examples of this dates back to the very beginnings of industrial production: the disposable safety razor blade. The patent for which was granted to King Camp Gillette on November 15th 1904. According to popular legend the
read moreIn our recent design calendar post on the 85th anniversary of the opening of the New York Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, we noted that they are currently presenting an exhibition under the title "Design and Violence" Although "presenting" is perhaps not the correct phrase, for rather than display objects as part of a traditional exhibition in their spacious if crammed base in Manhattan, for Design and Violence the MoMA are staging what they refer to as an "experimental online curatorial project".
read more
As older readers will be aware, one of our all time favourite projects is, was and probably always will be the majestic Spore Vase by Paulo Sellmayer. Not just because as an object it teaches us so much about contemporary society and the absurdity of the perceived control we have over the natural world; but because through discovering and dissecting Spore Vase we learned and understood an awful lot about our job and our responsibilities. Since we saw Spore Vase in Smalle Haven in Eindhoven we
read more
Until December 20th the Paris dépendance of Galerie kreo is presenting an exhibition dedicated to the vivacious variety of contemporary wooden furniture design. Presented under the sparklingly original title "only wood" the exhibition presents a mix of previously displayed objects and new works. Amongst the older works on show a special mention must go to the Woodwork lamp by BIG-GAME, a work premièred at Galerie kreo's 2008 La Liseuse exhibition, the Cork #3 storage system by Martin Szekely
read more
On seeing a lamp grace a Jean Prouvé desk on the Vitra stand at Orgatec 2014 we termed it "a genuine reminder that good design is often the simplest solution" On seeing a lamp grace a Jean Prouvé desk in the VitraHaus, we concurred. Quietly noting that it was, in addition, "a genuine reminder that a good name is often the simplest solution" Plug Lamp by Form Us With Love for Ateljé Lyktan is both those things. Packaged in the most delightful and engaging object. A desk lamp with an
read more
Cohesion is a concept with which we are very familiar. Largely because it is a state we never achieve. Much like the geometry's asymptote never touches its associated curve, so to do our lives approach cohesion, without ever achieving such a condition. It remaining something tantalisingly ahead of us. Infinitely so. And so it was with a particular personal interest we viewed the new 2014 Dutch Invertuals' exhibition: Cohesion. As is traditional with Dutch Invertuals the participating
read more
We don't consider ourselves slouches when it comes to the effort we make in regards of presenting ourselves at Orgatec Cologne, but we do have to doff our ornately feathered caps to the colleagues at Stylepark. In keeping with their curated "Featured Editions" programme at IMM Cologne where design studios are asked to create an installation around a given design object, for Orgatec 2014 Stylepark asked four designers to create a 12 sqm presentation reflecting their interpretation and
read more
It's now been twelve months since we decided to start recommending upcoming architecture and design exhibitions based on nothing more substantial and reliable than a press release or a PR agency text. A year in which we have recommended 60 exhibitions which sounded good, sounded worth visiting, sounded entertaining. Most of those that we subsequently visited were. A fact that has encouraged us to continue. And so to celebrate "5 New Design Exhibitions" first birthday, 5 New Design Exhibitions
read more
