"It's not possible to define a style in my work"1, opined once the Italian architect and designer Gae Aulenti. With the exhibition Gae Aulenti: A Creative Universe, the Vitra Design Museum Schaudepot don't contradict that opinion, but do provide for a framework for considerations on its validity...... Gae Aulenti: A Creative Universe, Vitra Design Museum Schaudepot Born in Palazzolo dello Stella (Udine) on December 4th 1927 Gaetana "Gae" Aulenti studied architecture at the Politecnico
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In a letter in 2008 to the editors of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians concerning remarks in an article on the staged illumination of Mies van der Rohe's skeletal frame constructions, the architecture historian Kathleen James-Chakraborty refers to the "linking of Heinrich Tessenow's Festspielhaus of 1910-12 in Hellerau with the installation for the glass industry that Mies designed (in collaboration with Lilly Reich, whom Petty does not mention) for the Stuttgart Werkbund
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Interesting, important and not irrelevant as hygiene is at the moment, the new exhibition at the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden doesn't concern itself with pandemics, but with another subject of contemporary global interest, importance and relevance: food, food supply, food security. And a theme not entirely unrelated to, certainly not unaffected by, our current reality...... Future Food. What will we eat tomorrow?, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden Established in 1912 the Deutsches
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We thought long and hard as to if we should continue our online exhibition recommendations series, or go back to offline exhibitions...... and decided for a return to offline. We fully appreciate that in a lot of countries museums are still closed, as indeed are the international borders that you would normally and naturally criss-cross for a short city break to visit those that are open; however, many museums are open, many more are planned/planning to open in the course of June, and
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With the exhibition Citizen Office the Vitra Design Museum staged not only their first conceptual, research based, exhibition, but also one of the first museal reflections on "the world of the office". Reflections which not only pointed towards new directions and understandings then, but which offer insights and lessons for today....... Citizen Office. As visualised by James Irvine The ubiquity of office work in our contemporary society belies the relative youth of "the office" as a
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While we'd all much rather physically visit architecture and design museums, our current enforced virtual patronage does allow us all an excellent opportunity to begin to understand architecture and design museums as more than just an exhibition space with shop and café, and to begin to learn to interact with them, and for all their collections, in new, proactive, manners. To understand architecture and design museums as tools as much as institutions. And while a virtual visit can never
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The museums may be closed, travel restricted and leaving your home, when possible, unadvised..... but that's no reason to restrict your cultural uptake, far less neglect the development of your architecture and design understandings. Or put another way, if you can't get to the museum..... let the museum come to you. Five online architecture and design exhibitions and museum collections to explore from your sofa, bed, garden, balcony, wherever..... Vitra Design Museum - Collection Online In
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Back in the days of the Roman Republic Martius was the month in which troops mustered in preparation for the coming battle season, to prepare, as it were, to March into war. Please don't! The world's out of control enough as it is! Rather use the coming spring as your incentive, to (a) make up for some of those New Year's Resolutions you've long forgotten you'd made and (b) to march into a future of new impulses, new understandings, new perspectives, a new world. To march into an architecture
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It's not just the presence, or lack of, female designers in the contemporary furniture industry, nor just the presence, or lack of, female designers in museum exhibitions that informs and influences understandings of the contribution of female designers to contemporary furniture design and the (hi)story of furniture design, it is also the presence, or lack of, female designers in design museum and applied arts museum collections, those depositories and reserves of furniture design's history and
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"What is the goal?" asked Elsie de Wolfe in 1913 in context of domestic interior design. "A house", she answered, "that is like the life that goes on within it, a house that gives us beauty as we understand it and beauty of a nobler kind that we may grow to understand, a house that looks amenity."1 How Elsie de Wolfe understood such, and how over the intervening century and a bit understandings of life, beauty, nobler beauty, amenity, the goal(s) of domestic interior design have developed and
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With the 2020 edition Stockholm Furniture Fair celebrates its 70th birthday. Grattis på födelsedagen! We did think about taking along a cake, but knew the halls of Stockholmsmässan would be filled to the rafters with Kanelbullar, as indeed would we. And so by way of a present, a Stockholm Furniture Fair 2020 High 6!! EIO Lounge Chair from Nuen The first thing to say is that we feel that, for us, EIO is but the start of a journey. The second thing to say is that ahead of any trade fair one
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"In many workshops and offices it is regularly attempted to achieve both direct and semi-indirect lighting by means of large, single, light sources, that is, to work only with ample general lighting. Yet as pleasant as this type of lighting may be, in many cases it proves unsatisfactory on account of certain inherent shortcomings"1 So opined in 1926 the German engineer Curt Fischer. Rhetorically. For in 1919 he had already patented his first solution to resolving such "inherent shortcomings".
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On March 6th 1927 the exhibition Europäisches Kunstgewerbe opened at the Grassimuseum Leipzig, not only a presentation of contemporary European applied arts but the inaugural exhibition in the museum's (almost finished) new home on the city's Johannisplatz. With the exhibition Spitzen des Art déco the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst Leipzig stage not only a presentation of European Art déco porcelain, but a reminder of both the Johannisplatz complex's Art déco heritage and the vibrancy,
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Apart from the chance to peruse and consider the collections and new products of and from a wide variety of manufacturers and labels, one of the real joys of visiting any furniture fair is the opportunity it allows to observe designers in conversation with manufacturers and labels. For all in pairings that currently don't formally exist. We never eavesdrop on such conversations, that would be rude, and to overplay our prowess as spies; but we do enjoy imagining what may arise from those
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In our post from the exhibition Design Gruppe Pentagon at the Museum Angewandte Kunst Cologne we noted that Gallery Pentagon was laterally based in Cologne's Bismarckstrasse. Bismarckstrasse 50 to be precise, a former cardboard packaging factory which in the 1980s was developed into spaces for creatives of various ilks..... .....Bismarckstrasse 50 is still home to creatives of various ilks, and is still home to a gallery, Galerie Martina Kaiser, where in context of the 2020 Passagen Interior
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Our increasingly networked, digital, virtual society is not only changing our relationship to innumerable everyday activities, activities such as personal communication, shopping or watching television to name but three, and thereby activities which a few short years ago seemed destined to remain unchanged for ever, but is also changing our relationship to work, be that in terms of what we do, where we do it or how we do it. Changes which invariably place both new demands on our furniture, and
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Within any regular pentagon one can locate, in numerous, manifold, relationships, the Golden Ratio, that centuries old guarantor of harmony, balance, beauty.... And within an irregular Pentagon? With the exhibition Design Gruppe Pentagon the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Cologne search for an answer in context of the 1980s Rheinland design quintet....... Design Gruppe Pentagon, Museum für Angewandte Kunst Cologne Established, more or less, formally in Cologne in 1985 by Gerd Arens, Wolfgang
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The long and winding (hi)story of furniture design is largely one of evolution not revolution, largely one of innumerable, often imperceptible, social, cultural, economic, technical, et al transformations, movements, hindrances and undulations which slowly, continually, combine and interact to widen and deepen the river as it flows. A process aided, abetted and accelerated by irregularly arising confluences where a new tributary flows into the unflinchingly onwards rolling mainstem. One such
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Off late, and certainly in a European context, January has become a month of forgoing, eschewing and general abstention, with campaigns such as Dry January and Veganuary extolling us to utilise our guilt at our dangerous, decadent, gluttony of late December as an impetus to radically alter our behaviour, as a catalyst for reduction. And while less is unquestionably more, and thus worth striving for, fundamental change is invariably more sustainably and meaningfully achieved through better
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In context of the 2013 exhibition Lightopia at the Vitra Design Museum a point of particularly intense illumination, pun intended, was the difference between light and lighting, and that the craft of the lighting designer is to bring a tangible form to an intangible material. With the exhibition Ingo Maurer intim. Design or what? Die Neue Sammlung – The Design Museum Munich celebrate, and remember, one of Germany's leading designer's of light..... Ingo Maurer intim. Design or what?, Die
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Looking back from the safety of 2019 it can be all too easy to assume that Bauhaus was a popularly received and much celebrated institution. ❌ From its very earliest days, even before the first students had arrived in Weimar, the institution met with tenacious criticism and steadfast resistance; and arguably nowhere more so than in Weimar. With the exhibition Mathilde von Freytag-Loringhoven. Painter, Author, Animal Psychologist and Bauhaus Critic the Stadtmuseum Weimar introduce one of the
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"Since the founding of the museum in 1864 there has been an ongoing committent to honouring the statute of the house, namely, to promote the art industries and the arts and crafts and to develop the taste of contemporary society"1 So noted the, then, Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst's Director Wilhelm Mrazek in the catalogue to the museum's 1969 exhibition Sitzen 69, Sitting 69, an exhibition which sought "to develop the taste of contemporary society" in terms of sitting/seating.
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"...when we shall hear The rain and wind beat dark December, how, In this our pinching cave, shall we discourse The freezing hours away?" asks Arvirargus of his brother Guiderius in Shakespeare's play Cymbeline, before lamenting, "We have seen nothing" Easily solved old boy, a visit to an architecture or design exhibition should not only provide for new, stimulating, impressions but plenty of discourse throughout not only December but for many, many months to come. For all a visit in December
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Sitting unassumingly, and largely unnoticed, in the middle of Germany, the city of Gotha may have only little resonance with the majority, with the great unwashed; however, every European royal family can trace their lineage back to Gotha: most famously the English royal family through Queen Victoria's 1840 marriage to Prince Albert, but the royal houses of Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Holland, Norway, you get the idea, can all trace their lineage back to and through Gotha. Gotha and royalty ✔
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