It is almost certainly more by chance than design, but in the week that Verner Panton would have celebrated his 88th birthday the Vitra Design Museum Gallery opened an exhibition devoted to his inimitable Visiona 2 exhibition from 1970. Presented as part of the warm up to the forthcoming "Panorama" exhibition from and by Konstantin Grcic, "Visiona 1970: Revisiting the Future" explores the background to and realisation of the Visiona 2 showcase, including an accessible, usable, sitonable
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On the 10th February 1932 "Modern Architecture: International Exhibition" opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Much more than simply being the very first architecture exhibition staged in and by the MoMA, Modern Architecture represented the first exhibition ever specifically devoted to the new architecture of the day and perhaps most importantly bequeathed said architecture a name: The International Style. If you will, with Modern Architecture, modern architecture had officially
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A week or so ago it was announced that Los Angeles based Gehry Partners had been selected to build a new tower block on Berlin's Alexanderplatz. As a general rule we read such announcements. And then carry on with more important things. However, the day after the announcement the Berlin based, Dutch architect/curator/critic Lucas Verweij tweeted in response to a Guardian article on the project: "Ohh Please, not this standard gentrification trick for Berlin" And immediately the words of
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By way of an addendum to our addendum to our "5 New Design Exhibitions for February 2014" post...... Until June 8th 2014 the Villa Esche in Chemnitz is presenting a special exhibition devoted to the artist and industrial designer Marianne Brandt. Built in 1903 by Henry van de Velde for the Chemnitz textile magnate Herbert Eugen Esche, the Villa Esche is not only a wonderful example of Henry van de Velde's approach to architecture and his understanding of his responsibilities in context of the
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"One of the typical activities in modern architecture has been the construction of chairs and the adoption of new materials and new methods for them. The tubular steel chair is surely rational from technical and constructive points of view: It is light, suitable for mass production, and so on. But steel and chromium surfaces are not satisfactory from the human point of view. Steel is too good a conductor of heat. The chromium surface gives too bright reflections of light, and even acoustically
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By way of an addendum to our "5 New Design Exhibitions for February 2014" post.... The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is currently showing "Pinned Up at the Stedelijk, 25 years of design", the first major retrospective of the work of Dutch designer Marcel Wanders. Presenting over 400 objects the exhibition promises to cover Marcel Wanders' complete career since the release of the Set Up Shades lamp in 1989 and in doing so present a chance to better understand the man, his thinking and his works.
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"In the development and designing of furniture one prevailing problem is the means for securing parts of the furniture together particularly when the parts are made of thin materials such as plywood or metal. This problem is particularly difficult when a certain amount of twisting or give between the parts is desired so as to provide resiliency to one of the parts. In general efforts to solve this problem have failed."1 So begins a patent application filed by Charles Eames on 28th July 1958.
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Fate may have been hard on February by abstractly depriving it of its rightful quotient of days, taunting it indeed by giving it a 29th every four years as if to say "....it could be soooo good....": fortunately the museums of this world are less divisive, treat February as if it was any other month and February 2014 sees a wealth of interesting new exhibitions. In an architecture heavy selection our recommendations from the new openings include Arabian architecture at the Louisiana Museum of
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It's probably indicative of the transiency of the contemporary furniture business, but during the recent Maison & Objet in Paris, Milanese manufacturer Kartell celebrated 10 years of the lamp Bourgie by Ferruccio Laviani. Time was when 10 years was but the blink of an eye for a lighting design object; these days, objects that survive a decade are the grand old men of the company's portfolio. To celebrate ten years of Bourgie Kartell asked 14 designers to re-imagine Ferruccio Laviani's
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During the 2014 Passagen design festival the Cologne flagship store of Italian kitchen and bathroom manufacturer Boffi presented an exhibition of objects by six young(ish) designers. And no we're not being deliberately provocative or derogative with our (ish). We know a couple of the designers involved. And know that they would admit they're not the youngest cats in the park any more. Presented under the title "Young Perspectives" and curated by the Cologne based "Design Services Agency"
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"Wood will be driven out of living spaces; even metal and glass, although much newer in domestic situations, are losing their importance. Plastics are on the advance....."1 What had caused the German magazine Stern to pronounce in February 1970 so unequivocally on the future of home furnishings? Stern had seen Verner Panton's Visiona 2 exhibition at Cologne Furniture Fair. And knew it had seen the future. "It is certain that a new age is rolling through our homes. What is coming is not just
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Our coverage of IMM Cologne 2014 may be reaching its conclusion, but we still have a few gleaming gems to bring you, the brightest of which was to be found on the Thonet stand: the new S 1200 desk by Randolf Schott from and with the Thonet Design Team. While classic Thonet desks such as Marcel Breuer's S 285 can work very well in a contemporary home office and/or as an informal place of work in a living room, they do bring with them a certain formal heaviness owing to their abstraction from
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It may have been because at IMM Cologne 2014 they were given a larger stand than in previous years. It may just have been that the time was ripe. The "why" is however ultimately unimportant, what is important is that at IMM Cologne 2014 Augsburg based Müller Möbelfabrikation presented a series of new products that decisively extended the company's portfolio, a series of new products that, in our opinion, make Müller Möbelfabrikation a more rounded, more complete company. And which achieved
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Curated annually by the German Design Council on behalf of Cologne Trade Fair the [D3] Contest is an international competition for young designers that reaches its conclusion every January with an exhibition and awards ceremony at IMM. The 2014 edition attracted over 600 entries, 22 of which made it onto the short list and so into the Cologne exhibition. And while we retain our well-founded distrust of design competitions, we do know that the [D3] Contest exhibition is a regular haunt of those
read moreAside from the ability to accurately focus light, Richard Sapper had a further motivation in designing his Tizio lamp: "Another problem was that I am a very disorganised person. On my desk there is no space to place a lamp, or at best one is forced to place it on the very edge, the rest of the table being covered with things that I probably don't need, but which I can only store on my desk. In such a situation one needs a lamp with a long boom arm. To effortlessly move such a lamp one has the
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In our post from the 2013 HfG Karlsruhe "Sommerloch" exhibition we wrote "Similarly the spiritedly named “Arbeitstitle” by Marlene Deken and the even more spiritedly unnamed object by Anne-Sophie Oberkrome from the K.O. Furniture class still have a lot of development work ahead of them, and may ultimately not work, but both presented in their design approach interesting solutions for quick and easy tool-less shelf construction." The K.O. Furniture project was run by Stefan Diez and asked the
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A few years ago the (smow) blog telephone rang..... "Good morning is it possible to speak to Philippe Starck please?" enquired the caller. "I'm sorry he's not here at the moment" we replied, truthfully, if not altogether helpfully. "When will it be possible?" came the inevitable follow-up. "We're not really sure, he's not here in Leipzig that often", we responded, truthfully if, again, not altogether helpfully, "you're probably better phoning the Paris office they tend to be better
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Revolutions in design and architecture invariably involve a new material. The oldest examples of this phenomenon being found in the context of metals: the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. And in the 6000 years since man first learnt to mix tin and copper the fascination for and desire to work with metal remains as primordial as ever. To celebrate the variety and durability of metal in design Frankfurt based Trademark Publishing recently released "Objects: Alle Metalle" an homage to classic and
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Every two years designers from the Dutch town of Groningen chum together to present a joint showcase during Cologne Design Week. The fourth "Gronicles" edition is being staged in the former Wohn-bar in Cologne Ehrenfeld and features works by Lotte Douwes, Jack Brandsma, Esther Jongsma, Lambert Kamps and Arend Groosman. Among a mix of product, conceptual and graphic design projects two works particularly caught our attention: Spatial Vase by Lotte Douwes and Bedcrate by Jack Brandsma. Created
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When in our preview of IMM Cologne 2014 we referred to it as marking the opening of the European design circus, we had no idea that it was a circus with a fairground. Sadly the carousel incorporating Zeitraum's Pelle chair seat shells was not there to provide adrenaline rushes. Only visual thrills as part of the 2014 Featured Editions programme. Premièred as a concept at IMM Cologne 2013 and curated by the online portal Stylepark, Featured Editions is a collection of installations in which
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When we spoke with Nik Back and Alexander Stamminger aka maigrau back in 2010 they told us that in the context of developing the, then, fledgling companies collection "...on the one hand as designers we naturally want to continue designing products ourselves, but on the other we can also imagine developing products for maigrau in cooperation with other designers." The new maigrau products being launched at IMM Cologne 2014 perfectly demonstrate this binary approach: two new products from
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When Charlotte Perriand arrived in Japan in 1940 to begin her commission from the Japanese Ministry of Trade and Industry to investigate the current state of industrial production in Japan and suggest new ways forward, her guide and translator was a young man by the name of Sori Yanagi. Some 15 years later Sori Yanagi created one of the archetypal and most instantly recognised pieces of modern Japanese design: the Butterfly Stool. There are those who can see Ms Perriand's influence on the
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With the winter solstice behind us and the days growing noticeably longer, the Vitra Design Museum exhibition Lightopia draws slowly towards its natural end. But before the lights finally go out on March 9th there are still a few genuine highlights in the Fringe programme to be enjoyed, including on Thursday January 23rd a talk with and about the Milan based designer Richard Sapper. Born in Munich in 1932 Richard Sapper has worked with and for companies as varied as Daimler-Benz, Kartell,
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In 2012 the Berlin based publishers/curators/editors Ilka & Andreas Ruby established BKULT as an online platform for discussing issues in contemporary architecture. Every two weeks a new question is posed and prominent guests are invited to answer "yes", "no" or "jein", and more importantly to justify their position and elucidate their argument. The platform is then opened to all and thus develops a discussion over topics such as "Does architecture need a quota for women?", "Do we need more
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