For reasons we've never truly understood "food" always crops ups somewhere, in some context during Vienna Design Week. Fortunately the organisers appear to have finally stopped designers growing herbs and vegetables in public places and have instead moved on to explore other, more practical, aspects of our modern relationship to what we eat and how we can best organise food production and distribution in the future. Among the projects this year is Depot_0411 by Austrian designer Marlene
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As we arrived in Vienna the first thing we noticed was our breath. It's autumn in Vienna. And we still haven't found our winter accommodation. When we do an object such as "Heat x Heart" may be just the thing to complete our winter retreat. Created by the Swedish born, London based designer Hilda Hellström in cooperation with E. Fessler Kamine, a Vienesse firm who have been involved with the production of heating ovens and oven tiles for over 200 years and whose products can be found, for
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It seems somehow fitting that our first post from Vienna Design Week 2013 should be from a Passionswege project. Passionswege is after all one of the major attractions for us of Vienna Design Week. For anyone new, or who has mistakenly stumbled across us, Passionswege is a programme within Vienna Design Week that pairs young designers with long established handicraft based manufacturers to develop a product/project that combines the tradition of the manufacturer with the new perspective
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"My, my, my, Delilah! Why, why, why, Delilah!" The morning of Friday September 27th 2013 was one of those misty autumn occasions that cause SANAA's immense new Vitra Factory Building in Weil am Rhein to merge, almost unseen, with the grey background. Even Herzog & de Meuron's new Basel Messe complex was reduced to nothing more grand than a continuation of the uncaring monotonous sky. The glitzing, shimmering palace of high summer just the weak shadow of a memory. And so it was perhaps fitting
read moreAs we noted in our designer barbecue post "... summer is bidding its final farewells" And with autumn's impudent chill invading ever more our pastoral calm the time for our hibernation approaches. And so we're currently exploring accommodation options. Fortunately it's been a bit of a "small house year" in these pages with, for example, Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Vitra's Diogene or Jean Prouve's Maison des Jours Meilleurs occupying our thoughts. Our first contact with reduced room
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In addition to Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen's superb modular case furniture system, a further highlight of the MoMa New York's 1940 "Organic Design in Home Furnishings" competition was Harry Weese and Benjamin Baldwin's winning collection in the "Furniture for Outdoor Living" category, a collection that included a tea wagon, table, benches, loungers and as a genuine highlight, a barbecue wagon. Resembling a coal bucket on wheels - and again owing to "issues" with the rights holder we sadly
read moreIn our post on Vitra's purchase of the Finnish furniture producer Artek we quoted from a letter George Nelson wrote to Charles Eames recounting a meeting with Alvar Aalto in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Below we quote more from said letter. We cannot prove or disprove any of the claims made therein. We assume it is all true. We say, you can keep your stories of rock star debauchery, your stories of film star excess, your stories of out of control poets and of the decadence of the European
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On Saturday September 14th London Design Festival 2013 opens to the public. We'll sadly not be there. Sadly because London in early Autumn is always a delightful thought, and also because the 2013 programme would appear to contain a few real gems. As many of you know we don't like recommending shows/exhibitions/products/anything really we haven't seen ourselves. And while at such events the genuine personal highlights are often found where and when one least expects them, there are a few
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At Design Miami Basel 2013 one of the more impressive presentations was without question the collection of Alvar Aalto furniture shown by Stockholm/Berlin based gallery Jackson Design. A presentation that included rare examples of Alvar Aalto's furniture for and by the Finnish manufacturer Artek. And all available for purchase. Basel based furniture manufacturer Vitra have gone one step further, and have purchased Artek. Following completion of his architecture studies in 1921 Alvar Aalto
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On Saturday September 7th the winners of the International Marianne Brandt Contest 2013 were unveiled at an awards ceremony in the Industry Museum Chemnitz. We'll have more on the winners, the 2013 contest and of course the accompanying exhibition real soon, but for now the winners. Congratulations to all! Product Design Award Product & Special Award Alessi: Susanne Schwarz, "Papier tragen" Appreciation Product, Special Award (smow) & Public Award: Anna Albertine Baronius, "2tables"
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"Do the books that writers don't write matter?", asks Julian Barnes in his 1984 novel Flaubert's Parrot. In a similar vein, do the posts that bloggers don't write matter? Among Julian Barnes' arguments for not disregarding the unwritten novel is that, "Besides, an idea isn't always abandoned because it fails some quality control test. The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes
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We know what you're thinking, lost furniture designs from Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames. ??? Yup. Two of the most important, influential and best known protagonists of mid-century modern design have a product series that has vanished without trace. And in our opinion it vanished exactly because Saarinen and Eames are two of the best known protagonists of mid-century modern design. But let's start at the beginning.... In 1940 the Museum of Modern Art New York staged their "Organic Design
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In our post "Wilhelm Wagenfeld Reviews Design for Use, USA" we quoted Wagenfeld's assertion that "In the current age machines and handicraft are intimately interwoven with one another." The Bauhaus Archiv Berlin is currently presenting an exhibition which ably demonstrates that some 80 years later such harmonious constellations cannot only still be found, but are still producing results every bit as refined and timeless as those realised by Wilhelm Wagenfeld. Poesie & Industrie - Poetry and
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Having already been to Chemnitz once this year we really are loathed to go a second time. It somehow feels unfair. Unjust. Twice. In one year. Why us! However on Saturday September 7th the winners of the International Marianne Brandt Contest 2013 contest will be announced and the awards exhibition formally opened. In the Industriemuseum Chemnitz. And we will be there. In the middle of June the nomination shortlist was unveiled, and even though it contains just the names of the nominated
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As any fool know contemporary product design arose from traditional crafts. The birth however wasn’t the smoothest, and the conflict between the form loving traditionalists who believed in a future of craft based industrial production and the machine fixated modernists with their focus on functionality dominated the inter-war years. Post World War II the modernists had largely succeeded in establishing their position and in his review of the 1951 exhibition “Design for Use USA” Wilhelm
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With our trademark "almost too late, but just sneaking in on time" we bring you Prima by Zaha Hadid. Conceived and realised in cooperation with the Austrian crystal concern Swarowski, Prima is a five piece installation based on Zaha Hadid's sketches for her 1993 Vitra Fire Station project. At the moment Prima is a very expensive, and very, very heavy installation on show in front of said Fire Station; however, if we know Vitra we can well imagine what the next step is... We have no formal, or
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As many of you will be more than aware, it is very rare that a genuine expert reviews an exhibition for these pages; however, in the case of the 1951 exhibition "Design for Use, USA" we have one. The German silversmith, product designer and Bauhaus alumni Wilhelm Wagenfeld. At least indirectly. On January 5th 1951 "Twenty-five thousand pounds of American home furnishings exhibition material"1 departed the Museum of Modern Art in New York to begin a two year tour of Europe. Curated by Edgar
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The most ingenious aspect of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe is probably its location - sandwiched as it is between the Karlsruhe Centre for Art and Media with its research institutes, museums, galleries et al and Karlsruhe Job Centre..... Could there be a better metaphor for the precarious position of today's professional designer? Probably. But we're sticking to ours. Opened in 1992 the HfG Karlsruhe was established with the aim of creating an arts and design school for the modern
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As any fool know, we traditionally begin our round-up of the summer semester student shows at the Bauhaus University Weimar. This year however Thüringen is having to yield to Stuttgart, and specifically the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart. In relation to institutions such as the Bauhaus Uni Weimar or Burg Giebichenstein Halle, the Industrial Design department at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart is relatively small, but no less interesting. For the 2013 Rundgang there were
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Anyone familiar with the roads in Leipzig's Lower East Plagwitz Village District will be aware that to call them roads is to do a great disservice to the memory of John McAdam and Edgar Purnell Hooley. In a biblical sense a road is composed of tarmac. In a Plagwitz sense a road is composed of potholes, loosely linked by random slithers of tarmac. Over the years we've given up getting annoyed about the state of the roads and... no, we've not. That's a lie. We get cross about it every single
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Normally we don't pay any heed to design contest exhibitions at design fairs. It just doesn't feel right, looking at them being in our jaundiced minds akin to reading those appalling advertorial "special supplements" that the print industry have fallen back on for survival. However at DMY Berlin 2013 something drew our attention to the exhibition for the adream 2012 competition. A pink brick to be precise. And we're mighty glad it did. Although "adream 2012" sounds like some truly horrendous
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As we noted in an earlier post, the team behind Depot Basel were recently awarded a highly coveted Swiss Design Award in the category Design Mediation. A very well deserved and very welcome recognition for all the work invested. And parallel to Design Miami Basel 2013 Depot Basel opened their latest exhibition, Craft & Drawing. We're a bit late with this post, Craft & Drawing only runs until June 29th 2013; however, as the largest part of our readership are and were unlikely to be in Basel
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It's about ten minutes since we mentioned Belgium. And we know that one or the other of you are getting nervous. Fearing we may have forgotten the magical, if not mythical, Kingdom. Fear no more. Belgium is back. At DMY Berlin 2013 students from the Thomas More University College Mechelen presented examples of their work in a group exhibition. We believe the VOMO in the exhibition name is the post-graduate furniture course in Mechelen, we are however a little confused and so may have got
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In our post about Diogene by Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Vitra we noted that a Jean Prouvé house could currently be marvelled at Design Miami Basel 2013. And we obviously don't want to deny all who weren't there the chance to do just that. Presented by Galerie Patrick Seguin the "Maison des Jours Meilleurs" was conceived in 1956 as a response to the campaigning French priest Abbé Pierre's call for low cost emergency housing for the Paris homeless. While the rich Italians and super
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