"Der var en stolt Theepotte", "there was a proud teapot", so begins Hans Christian Andersen's 1863 tale, The Teapot, Andersen continuing by recording that said teapot was, "proud of its porcelain, proud of its long spout, proud of its broad handle"; the start of the biography of an everyday household object, the start of the biography of one of those anonymous goods with which we all surround ourselves, that is one of the first items one meets in the Werkbundarchiv - Museum der Dinge, Berlin,
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Objectification A Curse; A Malediction; A Poison Amongst all animals the ability to attract the attention of others is of fundamental importance in numerous contexts, not least in context of attracting the interest of a potential mate; an attracting of others that is undertaken via a number of innately understood signals, signals that can be transmitted by smell or by sound but regularly are visual: form, colour, proportion, scale, etc used individually or in combination to convey unspoken
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For all that shops are places where design of all types is bought and sold, as the exhibition On Display. Designing the shop experience at Design Museum Brussels helps elucidate, throughout the past 150ish years shops have been both microcosms and drivers of architectural and design positions. If one so will have been display windows for contemporary architecture and design as much as for the goods they purvey....... On Display. Designing the shop experience, Design Museum Brussels For all
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Our recent reflections on the La Fonda bar stool by Charles and Ray Eames, and also our recent reflections on Goethe's Donkey, Goethe's chair "just high enough that one can sit half-standing", got us very naturally thinking a lot about stools of all types, the various and varied places one meets stools, the various and varied manners via which stools interact with and contribute to our daily lives, the (hi)story and development of the stool, in particular in context of the (hi)stories and
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Pressures of time meant we sadly couldn't make any of the Belgian design school graduate shows this past summer; however, the platform MAD Brussels did manage to have a look. Or did at least look at those design schools to be found in Brussels, and selected from the innumerable graduation projects on show their top ten. An honoured decemvirate subsequently presented in the showcase Graduation Show 2022 at the MAD HQ. A subjective selection, sure, but then aren't all selections? Including our
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In the 1880s design in France stood, in many regards, at the threshold of Art Nouveau, with the likes of, and amongst many others, Louis Majorelle, Émile Gallé or Hector Guimard beginning to start to question the production of, the formal expression of and our relationships with, our objects of daily use in context of the early years of the Third Republic and a rapidly rising industrialisation with all the associated social, economic, technical and political et al developments of the age. And
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In 1959 Alexander Girard was commissioned to design the interior of the New York restaurant La Fonda del Sol, a commission for which Charles and Ray Eames designed the seating. Yet whereas the La Fonda dining chair and La Fonda side chair are well-known, if currently out of production, components of the Eames' canon, what of the La Fonda bar stool....... La Fonda Bar Stool by Charles and Ray Eames Housed on the ground floor of the, then, new Time & Life building on Manhattan's Rockefeller
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In Poetics Aristotle argues poetry arose on account of two intrinsic human instincts: an "instinct for 'harmony' and rhythm" and "the instinct of imitation", as in representation rather than copying, an imitation Aristotle opines is the method via which humans learn, and that "to learn gives the liveliest pleasure". Yet while for Aristotle all forms of poetry are "in their general conception modes of imitation", again as in representation rather than copying, "they differ, however, from one
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In their 2021/22 exhibition Craft is Cactus the Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt, constructed a very convincing argument for including craft in the cactus family, a very convincing argument for making the Craftoideae a fifth subfamily of the Cactaceae. Yet while a very good argument, as we all know, much work remains to be undertaken on the classification of the Craftoideae, not least in context of their habitats: where does one find craft? Where do the Craftoideae prevail? With the
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Arguably there is no museum permanent collection exhibition more painstakingly, fastidiously, organized than that of the Werkbundarchiv - Museum der Dinge, Berlin: what initially resembles a hurried attempt to cram as much as possible into as few vitrines as possible, reveals itself on closer, more careful, inspection as vitrine after vitrine of disparate everyday objects organized according to a wide variety of characteristics and properties, such as, for example, objects formed from specific
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Le Klint A Phaesporia; A Fonden; A Pleat As the ancient runes and paintings within the Caves of Lego record, during a period of great darkness in the lands of the contemporary Denmark one Peder Vilhelm det Klint, more commonly recorded as PV, a sage of fundamental importance to the development of furniture in the contemporary Denmark, a sage, legend records, hewn from Møns Klint on the sacred isle of Falster and blessed with the ability to see into the past and into the future in the same
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For all that the (hi)story of architecture and design is one staged against a background of economic, social, environmental, cultural, et al evolutions and developments, it is also a (hi)story fundamentally dependent upon developments and evolutions in materials, and also in the development and subsequent evolution of novel technologies. Novel technologies and materials which not only enable new approaches to the construction of our buildings and the manufacturing of our objects of daily use,
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As we all know, the key to reading is learning your ABC. Once you've learned the letters, and combined them in simple words, you can approach more complex words, then sentences, paragraphs, essays and finally let that which you read discourse with your observations and experiences to help you better develop your understandings and appreciations of the world around us and those with whom we share it. But can learning the ABC of a designer help us to better approach understandings and
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"It is possible to live without taking colours in daily life seriously just as it is possible to live and to ignore music, sculpture and other arts" opines the textile designer Bernat Klein in his 1965 book Eye for Colour, and thereby not only freely equating colour with other cultural goods but also very neatly setting up the refutal, "no one will doubt, however, that life will be fuller and richer if colours are daily absorbed, handled and savoured as they can and should be".1 Eye for Colour
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There is an argument to be made that the craft of the glassmaker is as anachronistic in the 21st century as that of the candlemaker: an argument that while the later has seen their craft superseded by the electric lightbulb, the function of the former has not only been increasingly marginalised by the rise of industrially produced glassware, but also by the development of new materials, materials more robust and more durable than the famously fragile and transient glass. The candlemaker and
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As here in the northern hemisphere winter cedes to spring, not only is nature once again reawakening from its long repose but so too is the international museum community; and that, one senses, with more vigour than in the most recent springs where the Covid pandemic induced upsetting of the established order of the museal ecosystem, through both enforced closures and fundamental disruptions of essential exhibition development processes, dimmed somewhat the promise of the annual spring blush.
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In 1997 Euro-popsters Aqua declared that "life in plastic, it's fantastic". And in 1997 a greater part of humanity would have readily, and unquestioningly, concurred with Aqua that plastic was indeed fantastic. And that plastics offered us an endlessly fantastic, undimmably bright, future.1 But that was 1997. Last century. An eternity ago. And, as so oft, the passage of time has shaken once firmly held convictions and forced fundamental re-appraisals of all that which once seemed so
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"Dear Architect" wrote Maria Chinaglia Ponti in 1967 to the architect, but no relation, Gio Ponti, "why don't you design us some modern furniture? Daddy Walter is worried because our traditional stuff is not selling as it used to".1 An unsolicited request, from a company of whom he'd never heard, an architect of the status of a late 1960s Gio Ponti could have turned down, it wasn't as if a late 1960s Gio Ponti needed the commission; however, something about the letter from Maria Chinaglia
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With furniture, as with so much in life, it is rarely the showy, high profile, works, or individuals, that teach us most, but those works, and those individuals, who in their anonymity and modesty accompany us in invisible silence. Or rather the anonymous and quiet could teach us most, if we spent less time being distracted by, letting ourselves willingly be distracted by, the noise of the showy. With the project Monobloc author and director Hauke Wendler, and a team of co-collaborators,
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"...one only finds warmth of life and sincerity where human nature is allowed to flourish", opined the German designer Erich Dieckmann in 1931, "one shouldn't forget that in our apartments. Let's treat our contemporary homes to something humane. Something unelaborate, something provisional, with some leeway and space for things to grow as they wish over time."1 With the exhibition Chairs: Dieckmann! The Forgotten Bauhäusler Erich Dieckmann, the Kunststiftung des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt and
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We were obviously off ill on the day of the great global public debate about whether, given the myriad problems of contemporary societies, our resource emergencies, and the effortless manner in which we've managed to turn the Internet, the greatest tool ever placed at the disposal of a member of the Animalia, into a platform for hate and vanity and greed and crime; if given all that, if we all wanted to, if we all should, move to the Metaverse. But that debate must have occurred, for the
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Familiar as our objects and rituals of daily life are to us, to someone from the 16th century they would appear most, most, odd, just as their familiar 16th century objects and rituals would appear most, most, odd to someone from the 11th century: yet as Simon & Garfunkel teach us "that's not unusual, No, it isn't strange", for as societies develop they acquire new objects and rituals, daily life continually evolves anew alongside, and in conjunction with, new objects and new rituals. And if we
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The popular (hi)story of furniture design is, no-one could argue, a very male (hi)story.1 Which doesn't mean that furniture design is a profession at which males excel more than females, a profession for which males have a natural affinity above and beyond that of females, that females' natural domains are textiles and colours; much more is because that popular (hi)story of furniture design contains flaws, biases, inaccuracies and under-illuminated corners. A great many of which can be traced
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Hygge A Curse; A Malediction; A Torment As the runes in the Caves of Lego record, ever since the reign of the post-Viking autocrat King Mark Edsføring, furniture, lighting, textile and accessory design in Denmark has endured a great many trials as varied and various forces have sought to use them to their advantage, have sought to employ furniture, lighting, textile and accessory design in Denmark for their own benefit rather than letting furniture, lighting, textile and accessory design in
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