Whereas politics, economics or sport in West Germany and East Germany are well and widely studied, and the similarities and differences regularly and publicly analysed and contextualised, thereby allowing for more refined, nuanced, popular understandings; design in and from the two Germanys remains, largely, a niche subject for a small band of specialists, and on a popular level something not only repeatedly reduced to a few works, institutions and protagonists, but also defined by
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Of all the genres of furniture which accompany global society, none, arguably, is more self-explanatory, more obvious, than the table. Yet for all the simplicity, or perhaps exactly because of all the simplicity, the table is, arguably, the most versatile of all the genres of furniture which accompany global society; the contemporary table existing as it does in a myriad forms and contexts. And not just physical forms and contexts......... The (hi)story of the table, in terms of verifiable
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Front An Anna; A Sofia; A Charlotte; A Katja; A Conduit. According to the sacred Köttbullar of Ikea, the quadruplets Anna af Front, Sofia af Front, Charlotte af Front and Katja af Front were born and raised on the island of Konstfack to the west of Stockholm, the ancestral home of the Swedish af Fronts, an island as famed for its horses, monkeys and brightly painted houses as its af Fronts, and where the kvartett took their first steps in product and furniture design, that hereditary
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What is a chair? You sure? With the exhibition Chairs. For children only! the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig, explore the (hi)story of and developments in children's seating, and in doing so not only allow for insights into an all too often undervalued, underappreciated, ignored, genre of furniture, but also forces you to reconsider your response to what you thought was a very, very straightforward question... Chairs. For children only!, Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst,
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"In his work the designer seeks to find the constancy of the good", wrote Karl Clauss Dietel in 1973, a lightly articulated yet not so straightforward task for, as he continues, not only is the assessment of such dependent on a myriad varying factors, but "the search for what defines design, what it grows from, where it comes from and where it wants to go, takes on new dimensions against the background of our cultural upheaval".1 With the exhibition Simson, Diamant, Erika. Formgestaltung von
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Although cultures very often arose in splendid isolation, only very few remained splendidly isolated for very long. For much like a young child who having learned to walk intuitively understands what a powerful tool mobility is/can be and seeks to exploit it to the fullness of their abilities, so too did our youthful human civilisations very quickly understand that there was, in all probability, a world beyond their own, and began wandering, at first in their immediate vicinity but
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"I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it is always June", ponders Anne Shirley in Lucy Maud Montgomery's 1915 novel Anne of the Island. "You'd get tired of it", sighs her adoptive mother Marilla Cuthbert by way of reply. "I daresay", responds Anne, "but just now I feel that it would take me a long time to get tired of it..." Thoughts we very much concur with as we survey and contemplate the varied profusion of new architecture and design exhibitions sprouting forth in June
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Denmark A Peninsula; An Archipelago; A Context Situated in the middle of the European continent Denmark was long considered evidence of the existence of the lands of Scandi, a fabled commonwealth comparable with Thomas More's Utopia, albeit rather than one where the form and operation of society has become perfected, one where the forming and production of furniture has become perfected; however, more recent research has convincingly both disproved the existence of Scandi, demonstrating that
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In the final decades of the 19th century the lands of the, then, German Empire, established themselves amongst the leading protagonists in the developments of contemporary applied arts as they moved towards that which we today term design. A leading position which, in certain regards, became a European dominance in the course of the 1900s, 1910s and 1920s through the contributions made to the evolving practices, processes, expressions and understandings of the period by institutions such as,
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Following the declaration of the French Republic in 1792 a new calendar was introduced in the realms of France: the Revolution had washed away France past and the Republic marked the start of a new reality for mankind, one of universal Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, and therefore demanded a resetting of the collective clock, a new measuring of time, and thus out went the Gregorian calendar and its historic associations with church and state, and in came le calendrier républicain, the French
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Wandering aimlessly through the digital Marcel Breuer Archive one afternoon, we stumbled across a letter dated July 25th 1950 from Peter M Fraser, one of Breuer's employees, to the Eames Office, enquiring about a lighting design by Charles and Ray that Breuer was interested in using in one of his architectural projects, and requesting... ..."a lighting design by Charles and Ray"??? Eames lighting??? Eames furniture ✔ Eames toys ✔ Eames exhibitions ✔ Eames textiles ✔ Eames films ✔ Eames
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As Peer Gynt reminisces with his dying mother, they dwell long and fondly on how, when Peer was a child, they would imagine his bed was a sleigh whisking them across a frozen fjord, a sleigh pulled by "fleet-foot horses". Or more accurately by a cat proxying for fleet-foot horses; a cat who before being pressed into service as a horse had been peacefully "sad på en kubbestol"1, sat upon a kubbestol: a chair hewn from a tree trunk, and an item of furniture which is as closely associated with
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In the northern hemisphere* December marks not only the darkest period of the year but also that moment when light begins to return: following the Winter Solstice our days start to get a little longer, and a little brighter. And in December 2020 not just astronomically, but metaphorically. Midwinter 2020 symbolising a moment when a particularly dark year, a particularly dark period, starts to get a little brighter, a moment when a little more light will start to slowly seep into our days,
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The study of vernacular furniture can teach us a lot about not only the development of understandings of furniture, nor only of the development of societies and cultures, nor nor only only about relationships between furniture and wider realities, but also how the position of furniture as a cultural good, as a good embedded in a culture and society, can see furniture serve as a component of projected understandings of heritage and identity, and in doing so can endow attributes on an object of
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The sense, logic or otherwise of the biannual changing of the clocks is a subject that can keep any conversation animated until the next change occurs......When it can start all over again. The biannual repositioning of the hands of time is however also an opportune moments to consider our relationship to time, for all our measurement of time, our harnessing of time, our charting of time, and of time metaphoric and time symbolic as represented by that embodiment of time tangible ... the clock.
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"Trunk-hasped, cart-heavy, painted an ignorant brown. And pew-strait, bin-deep, standing four-square as an ark"1 Reading Seamus Heaney's musings on his Settle Bed one could be forgiven for considering it a thoroughly unremarkable object. Ignorant even. That would however be to misunderstand the nature, spirit, essence, of poetic construction. And the nature, spirit, essence of the Settle Bed. A World of Vernacular Furniture: The Settle Bed. As a settle...... (Photo Kenneth Allen via
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"At the present day a library has become as necessary an appendage to a house as a hot and cold bath" wrote the Roman Stoic Seneca at some point in the first century CE, "I would excuse them straightway if they really were carried away by an excessive zeal for literature; but as it is, these costly works of sacred genius, with all the illustrations that adorn them, are merely bought for display and to serve as wall-furniture."1 And today? While the glossy coffee table book may be have become
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In all corners of the globe one finds objects of furniture which developed in response to local conditions, traditions and practices; vernacular objects without a formal author and which although, on account of?, arising from a very specific place and time can, invariably, both teach us a lot about the essentials of furniture and help explain furniture's relationships with wider realities. And objects we want to celebrate, starting with arguably, one of the best known examples of vernacular
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Back in the year 1 BCE, Before Corona Epidemic, we developed a plan to use 2020 to tour through contemporary office design, a tour to be undertaken both physically and theoretically. A very simple plan developed in the knowledge that in October the Orgatec office furniture fair would be staged in Cologne, and that such a tour would, hopefully, allow us to approach Orgatec 2020 from differentiated and manifold perspectives. And a simple plan, which, and as with all simple plans, proved more
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Developed in the mid-1960s as an office furniture system, the inherent flexibility and variability of USM Haller's modular system has allowed it to naturally evolve alongside office practices and realities; for example, alongside the shift in recent decades from rigid to more flexible office scenographies, alongside the rise in recent decades of home working, or, most recently, with the USM Security Screen which naturally, and quickly, allows any existing USM reception desk to be effortlessly
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"We feel ourselves beholden to the traditions of Bauhaus"1 opined Rolf Kuhn, Director of the Dessau based Zentrum für Gestaltung, in the catalogue for the institute's 1988 exhibition Experiment Bauhaus. And while that may have been the case in the late 1980s, it certainly wasn't always so in East Germany. With the exhibition Shaping everyday life! Bauhaus modernism in the GDR the Dokumentationszentrum Alltagskultur der DDR in Eisenhüttenstadt allow for not only an exploration of the
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As all familiar with the peculiar and idiosyncratic method by which these dispatches are produced will appreciate, come March 30th 2019 there will be a few fundamental changes, as the smow blog team are forced to abandon our familiar home on the internet and create a new one for ourselves in the analogue wastelands of the (dis)United Kingdoms. And as Brexit's unregulated shadow casts itself ever deeper, indelibly, suffocatingly, over the smow blog office, our thoughts turn, somewhat
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Slowly but surely the temperatures across Europe begin to fall, along with the leaves and the hours of daylight. Hibernation approaches. And by way of an accompaniment to the imminent long sleep, a Radio smow beds playlist. ...and so to bed! Back at the 2018 KABK Den Haag graduation festival the project Windows Without a View by Rudi van Delden investigated how you can "reclaim the missing third of your life”, i.e. when your in bed, and for all explored "the bedroom as the new office
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"Have you ever laid out all your plates like a carpet, or piled furniture into a tower?", asks the introduction to the Technical University Dortmund's project, Alles, was ich habe [Everything that I possess] Our answer to the last question is a categorical, yes. It was one afternoon during our final year at secondary school, and together with a few chums we stacked all the common room furniture up against one wall. Just to see if we could. We could. Alles, was ich habe is a little more
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