At Bratislava Design Week 2014 Jakub Pollág and Václav Mlynář a.k.a. Studio deFORM re-premièred their Transmission light family; "re-premièred" because although initially created in 2012 for Prague based Kavalierglass, since earlier this year the lamp family have been part of the portfolio of another Czech glass manufacturer, Lasvit. Constructed from a series of concentric glass structures which become ever more elongated as their diameter shrinks, the Transmission lamps present an
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In 2014 the exhibition "madeinhungary" celebrates its 10th anniversary. What began as a presentation of contemporary Hungarian product design hosted as part of the Budapest "Home Trend" trade fair has existed since 2013 as an independent event staged during Budapest Design Week. And has slowly evolved into a sort of annual family get together for the Budapest design community. For the 2014 edition organisers, curators and project initiators Szilvia Szigeti and Tamás Radnóti have compiled a
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For some 200 years Wiener Silber Manufactur have produced the finest silverware. Exquisite cutlery, table services, coffee pots and sugar bowls designed by both the firm's own craftsman and also developed in co-operation with external designers: works by leading protagonists of the Wiener Werkstätte such as Josef Hoffmann or Kolo Moser being joined over the decades by designs from and by the likes of Oswald Haerdtl, Otto Prutscher, Gregor Eichinger or Claesson Koivisto Rune. Yet regardless of
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Having announced in our introductory Bratislava Design Week post that we are in favour of a global network of regional design weeks that focus on local designers, we did of course start our coverage of Bratislava Design Week 2014 with a product designed by a Swiss designer and manufactured by an Austrian company. In our defence Fidelio by Christian Spiess was being displayed as part of the exhibition "Work is all around" and as such was in Bratislava because curators Lubica Husta and Viera
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Whether 'tis nobler in the muscles to suffer The slings and arrows of short telomeres, Or to rise up against a sea of troubles, And by standing, extend them? In addition to articles on the wonders of handmade Swedish butter, the problems of supermarket etiquette and ill thought through editorials on the Scottish referendum, the English newspaper "The Guardian" occasionally publishes readable articles, one such being Dr Luisa Dillner's recent "Is sitting down bad for my health?" Citing
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We're spending an awful lot of time at Vienna Design Week 2014 photographing mirrors. If we were at all competent at what we do we would now wax lyrical about how mirrors are the "top tr**d" at Vienna Design Week 2014, an indication of contemporary designers desires to reflect the ills of modern society, to make us face up to our own social responsibility and question the increasing narcissistic nature of the human existence as exemplified by the ubiquitous selfie, and for all the daily flood
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According to Christian Holmsted Olesen, Hans J. Wegner's famous JH540 Valet Chair with its coat hanger shaped backrest and pop up seat almost never saw the light of day. Following its presentation at the 1951 Copenhagen Carpenters Guild Exhibition Wegner decided he didn't actually like the four legged chair after all, and announced that it shouldn't be produced. However King Frederik IX had seen it, was fascinated by both concept and design and demanded that it be produced. He wanted one. He
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The last time we visited the premises of Vienna shoemaker Rudolf Scheer & Söhne it was for the presentation of Antoinette Bader's LacesLamp project during Vienna Design Week 2010. Since then little has changed in the way Rudolf Scheer & Söhne make their shoes, but a lot has in terms of the space. Situated next to the company's main premises the so-called SHEER-Raum has been transformed from the dust and brick building site of then into a sensitively decorated and organised sales space. And a
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As we alluded to in our post from Vienna based design studio chmara.rosinke's Passionswege 2013 project with Wäscheflott, we've not always been the biggest fans of the work of chmara.rosinke. Or better put Ania Rosinke and Maciej Chmara a.k.a. chmara.rosinke have regularly produced projects which have, in one way or another, caused us to roll our eyes helplessly skywards. On the other hand chmara.rosinke have also regularly impressed us. The aforementioned project with Wäscheflott being one
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"I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers" exclaims Anne Shirley in Lucy Maud Montgomery's 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables, "it would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn't it?" Yes Anne, it would. Yet while Ms Shirley turned her youthful attention to decorating her bedroom with the brightly coloured maple branches so prevalent on Prince Edward Island at this time of year, our joy is found in the new architecture and design exhibitions opening in the
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In our post from the launch of the Tools for Life collection by Rem Koolhaas and OMA for Knoll during Milan Design Week 2013 we noted that the highlight for us was the so-called "11 Floor Seating" legless chair. For all we commented that with ever more time, professional and personal, being spent working with tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices, the requirements of chairs was slowly evolving and that there would be an increasing need for high-quality furniture which allows one to,
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Time was when the candlestick maker was an important profession. No candlestick. No light. Or at least no secure light. These days with our fancy electric lighting candlesticks tend to be reduced to one of those quaint historical artefacts. Something every designer and craftsman tries at least once in their career, but a relatively safe place where they can experiment and try things out without necessarily having to produce anything good. No one is going to judge you by a candlestick. A
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As we've often noted in these pages, the future will be analogue. That's not to say that we will turn our backs on all our modern technology, but much more as technology takes over ever more aspects of our daily lives and as we understand what technology can do and how best to harness it, not only will we be freed to concentrate on those things which genuinely matter to us but we will have ever more freedom to organise and lead our lives as we want, freed from the conventions and constraints
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At the risk of starting a tradition we can't maintain, and so ultimately leading us to disappoint a lot of readers, again, it is becoming tradition that our first post from Vienna Design Week concerns a Passionswege project. Largely because Passionswege is one of the principle reasons we come to Vienna, and so it seems fitting to begin our time in Vienna with the Passionswege programme. But also considering Passionswege is the seed from which Vienna Design Week grew, it just seems respectful.
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Everyone knows Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto. Everyone knows his flowing, free-formed buildings and his moulded plywood furniture. What is there new to learn? What is the point in another Alvar Aalto exhibition. What indeed................................ Born in Kuortane Finland on February 3rd 1898 Alvar Aalto began studying architecture at the Helsinki University of Technology in 1916, graduating in 1921 and established his own architectural practice in Jyväskyla in 1923. In
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On Friday September 26th the Egon Eiermann Society will present the inaugural "Egon Eiermann Chair" Award at a ceremony in the Neue Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche in Berlin. Initiated to recognise those individuals or organisations who have made an especially valuable contribution to the maintenance and preservation of Egon Eiermann's works the first Egon Eiermann Chair will be awarded to Barbara and Eckard Düwal for their restoration of the so-called Wohnhaus Matthies in Potsdam-Babelsberg.
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We've spent a lot of 2014 travelling backwards on trains, racing towards the future with our eyes fixed firmly on the past. We know its a metaphor. We just hope it isn't an omen. Time will, as ever, tell. And with this being late September, the next five weeks will see us travelling backwards through the European design landscape with an unhealthy, and fate taunting, regularity. Our Autumn Tour 2014 begins at Vienna Design Week where, aside from the Passionswege projects, were particularly
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As we recently noted, summer is slowly giving way to autumn and with it the realisation that long sunny days lounging in gardens or on poolsides will slowly give way to long sunless days in office chairs. Autumn 2014 also means for us Orgatec, Europe's largest office furniture trade fair, and an invariable flood of "new" office chair "designs." Consequently, it should come as no surprise that we recently took our copy of Jonathan Olivares' A Taxonomy of Office Chairs from the (smow) bookshelf.
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As has oft been noted in these pages, the years following the Second World War were years of quick, radical, fundamental social, cultural and economic change. Changes from which the then fledgling furniture design industry greatly benefited: and from which it continues to benefit with many of the popular mass market designs created back then becoming the design classics of today. The design week having not yet been invented and those furniture trade fairs that existed being very much the
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For a man who is universally lauded as one of the most important Danish designers of the 20th century, there is an inexplicable scarcity of reliable, independent information on Poul Henningsen. At least in languages other than Danish. Even the British Library in London, the self proclaimed keeper of the "world's knowledge", can only offer a couple of non-Danish language texts. Library shelves around the globe however buckle under the weight of Danish language works by and about Poul
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Charlotte Perriand was famously of the opinion that in terms of furniture design wood was a “… vegetable substance, bound in its very nature to decay,….” and that the future belonged to metal. For all the bent steel tubing of European modernism.1 Poul Henningsen in contrast warned that the industrial production of steel tube furniture as promoted by Perriand, Le Corbusier, the Bauhaus clique and their ilk "maa ogsaa føre til, at de sekundære Former ved Stolen" - may also lead to secondary
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By way of an addendum to our "Five New Design Exhibitions for September 2014" post, until November 2nd the Kunstgewerbemuseum Dresden are presenting the exhibition Okolo Offline Two - Collecting. Organised by the Kunstgewerbemuseum in collaboration with Depot Basel, "Okolo Offline Two" follows on from the exhibition Okolo Offline held at Depot Basel in April this year. As with Okolo Offline One the central pillar of Okolo Offline Two is formed by the Prague based creative collective Okolo and
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Erected in 1927 in context of the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition "Die Wohnung" the Weißenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart aimed to achieve "…. a reduction in house construction and running costs, in addition to a simplification of housework and a general improvement in living standards" But did it? Or is it just a collection of buildings by Max Taut, Hans Poelzig, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Mart Stam, Peter Behrens and their ilk? A chance for a close connected group of modernists to show off?
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The inescapable chill in the morning air and the deep-seated boredom in the eyes of school aged children can only mean that summer is, ever so slowly, coming to an end. And just as spring beckons life to return in the natural world, so to does autumn herald a revival of activity in the unnatural world of museums and galleries. Consequently, whereas in August we only managed to find three architecture and design exhibitions to recommend, for September we have seven! A Magnificent Seven who
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