When is a terminus not an end station? When it is the exhibition Endstation Ubierring 40 - Terminus Ubierring 40 - at the Kölnisches Stadtmuseum, Cologne. Endstation Ubierring 40 at the Kölnisches Stadtmuseum, Cologne On March 31st 1993 the Art Department at Cologne Fachhochschule, the city's university of applied sciences and arts, closed, the final act in a process which, effectively, began in 1971 with the merging of the Kölner Werkschulen art and craft college with the Fachhochschule.
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Following on from the exploration of Ferdinand Kramer's design work in the exhibition The Kramer Principle: Design for Variable Use at the Frankfurt Museum Angewandte Kunst, the Frankfurt based Deutsches Architekturmuseum is presenting Line Form Function. The Buildings of Ferdinand Kramer, an exhibition dedicated to the German functionalist's architectural output. In many ways the logical follow up. And an excellent extension and completion of The Kramer Principle. So much so it makes you
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Horribly denigrating as the term "Swedish Grace" unquestionably sounds, it is a well meant phrase coined to refer to the classicist art and design movement that developed in Sweden in the 1920s and 30s: a movement which served as a bridge between the Art Nouveau-esque national romanticism of the early 20th century and the approaching functionalism, and which thus in many respects paved the way for the Scandinavian interpretation of international modernism as so magnificently presented at the
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For the 13th century Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas beauty required a perfect combination of integritas, consonantia & claritas - integrity, harmony, clarity. In a similar vein the 15th century Italian playwright and philosopher Leon Battista Alberti defined beauty as the harmony of all parts in relation to one another, a character in one of his plays extending this idea to proclaim, in answer to a question concerning a woman's' beauty, "She is so beautiful that nothing could be added to her,
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In our 5 New Design Exhibitions for October 2015 post we recommended, amongst other exhibitions, the Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec showcase 17 Screens at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, noting, "There is something very agreeable about the way Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec pop up in the most unexpected places with the most unexpected projects. Not least because, and as a general rule, the more unexpected the location and the more unexpected the project the greater the chance of experiencing something that
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Obviously defining a "Best of" Dutch Design Week, or indeed any design week, is impossible, one can only hope to attempt to collate your personal highlights and thus provide an impression of how you experienced the event: which is exactly what DAD Galerie Berlin are currently doing with a presentation of some their highlights. Our highlight of their highlights is without question the new hanging lamp by Floris Wubben. When we spoke to Floris at his solo Low Tech Crafts exhibition at DAD
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December can be a trying month: always having to think of others; always having to patronise bars and restaurants you've spent the rest of the year wishing would return to the parallel hell from whence they came; eating, eating and eating as if trapped in some culinary Groundhog Day. Do yourself a favour, gift yourself a few hours and visit one of the following new design and architecture exhibitions opening in December 2015. We can't guarantee they'll be good, but can guarantee they'll be
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In our post from the Barbican Art Gallery exhibition "The World of Charles and Ray Eames" we noted the disappointing sparsity with which the otherwise excellent exhibition deals with the private world of Charles and Ray Eames. Arguing that understanding the designer is necessary to fully understanding their work. Charles and Ray are sadly no longer with us to directly answer our many questions; however, in the person of Charles's grandson Eames Demetrios we have an excellent alternative.
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The inclusion of a sheet steel bookend amongst our photos from the Grassi Museum for Applied Arts exhibition “Art Déco: Smart, Precious, Sensual” resulted in one or the other queried look in our direction, enquiries after our health and even questions as to if all our other photos were so unusable that, in our desperation, we had been reduced to using a shot of a piece of understatedly painted bent sheet steel. No, no we replied, all was good. As were the rest of our photos. That bookend
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As we noted in our post celebrating Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle's 100th birthday, one of Paul Thiersch's first initiatives upon taking charge of the Handwerkerschule Halle, the future Burg Giebichenstein, was to establish workshops to connect art and trade and thus properly prepare his students for the demands of the emerging industries. It is therefore only fitting that to round off the institution's centenary celebrations an exhibition should be being staged celebrating the
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As older and more loyal readers will be aware if there is one thing we really, really dislike, more so than even "street food" or swans, it is black and white portrait photography. Which of course explains why we are so fascinated by the black and white portraits by Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn........ Anton Corbijn - Hollands Deep & 1-2-3-4 @ C/O Berlin Born in Strijen, Holland as the son of a clergyman and nurse Anton Corbijn taught himself photography in his teenage years and cut his
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All with an interest in and/or a desire to understand how historicism in architecture, art and design ceded to modernism could do worse than visit Germany this coming winter. Following on from the opening of the exhibitions "Art Nouveau. The Great Utopian Vision" at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg and "The Bauhaus #itsalldesign" at the Vitra Design Museum, the Grassi Museum for Applied Arts Leipzig have now closed the gap with their new exhibition Art Déco: Smart, Precious, Sensual
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By way of an addendum to our 5 New Design Exhibitions for November 2015 post, the Kaiserslautern University of Technology's Architecture Gallery are hosting "Jean Prouvé - vom System zum Haus" - "Jean Prouvé - from system to house" - in which the results of a semester project exploring the construction systems of Jean Prouvé are being presented. Although arguably best known for his furniture designs, a large part of Jean Prouvé's career and energy was spent developing, and indeed
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Since 2000 the International Marianne Brandt Contest has been searching for the Poetry of the Functional in art and design. That the triennial competition is still running doesn't mean they have yet to find it, rather underscores both the variety of interpretations inherent in the phrase and also the evolving nature of poetry, functionality and the relationship between the two: there is no definitive answer just an irregular array of contemporary, potentially fleeting, best fits. And over the
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On Thursday October 29th the winners of the Kölner DESIGN Preis 2015 were announced in a ceremony at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Köln, MAKK. Open to students from Cologne's seven creative colleges and their international partner institutions the 8th edition of Germany's highest endowed prize for student diploma projects carried a total prize money of €15,000 and saw 29 projects nominated, projects ranging from products, to concepts and onto more fundamental research. For us the use of
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In the complete interview with Matylda Krzykowski ahead of the Depot Basel exhibition Forum for an Attitude, there is a statement from Matylda which try as we might we simply could not crowbar into our published text: "most people have never visited a design show, art shows yes, but not design shows" It hadn't occurred to us before. But it's true. You don't go to design museums do you? And presumably also not architecture museums! Or certainly not architecture musems if you don't go to
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In our post from the exhibition Art Nouveau. The Great Utopian Vision at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg we stated, with a certain degree of authority, that "No one likes a hippy" The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis obviously do and are celebrating that fact with the exhibition Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia. Subtitled "An Examination of the Radical Art, Architecture, and Design of 1960s & 1970s Counterculture" the Walker Art Center's exhibition promises to explore
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"What is understood today as the housing problem is a specific intensification of the bad housing conditions endured by the working class through the sudden large scale movement of the population to the major cities; huge increases in rents, an even greater overcrowding of individuals in houses, and for some the impossibility of even finding suitable accommodation." 1 Although written in 1872 Friedrich Engels analysis of the urban housing situation remains in many ways as contemporary as it
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"The World of Charles and Ray Eames" It is inherent in the nature of America's most productive 20th century creatives that there is no "world" of Charles and Ray Eames; there are "worlds" In their new Eames retrospective the Barbican Art Gallery London attempt to combine these worlds into a coherent, comprehensible universe. The World of Charles and Ray Eames @ Barbican Art Gallery London Charles Eames was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1907. Ray Kaiser in Sacramento, California in 1912.
read moreIn our design calender post on the inaugural Memphis Exhibition in Milan we noted that although important for the development of design and architecture, the Memphis group was never that successful commercially. Which is not to say that Memphis furniture wasn't bought and used to furnish homes. According to Artemide co-founder Ernesto Gismondi, who also served as Managing Director of the Memphis trading company, there are, or at least were, two homes furnished exclusively with Memphis. And
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No one likes a hippy. Which might explain the ambivalence many have towards Art Nouveau. For with its floral motifs, visual dreamscapes, hopeless utopianism and all-pervading fascination with nudity, Art Nouveau is in many ways the original hippy movement. And this association may also be what bestows the preeminent international arts and architecture movement of the late 19th and early 20th century its unmistakable smack of kitsch, its perceived lack of contemporary cultural relevance.
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Among the more interesting and entertaining texts we didn't publish from IMM Cologne 2015 was our post on the showcase "The Journey of Things" featuring works by 6 Berlin and 2 London based designers. It would have been a great text. Had it been published. That it wasn't is one of those mysteries which only those with an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the smow blog can understand. Fortunately for us, and indeed all in or near Berlin in the coming weeks, until October 31st works
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As we've often opined in these pages, design is a way of thinking, not a profession. An opinion we inevitably illustrate with a picture of a chair being used to hold a door open at Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle. But in what do designers actually believe? What are their motivations? Their goals? From where does their understanding of design originate? Why design? Such and similar questions form the core of the Depot Basel exhibition "Forum for an Attitude" which begins in Weil am
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As many of our regular readers will be aware, we don't like food design. We would say "we can't stomach it", however, that would draw more attention to the subject than it could ever deserve. We're particularly wary of Spanish food design, and the connections that invariably raises to some of the most senseless, egoistic and narcissistic episodes in the recent history of cuisine. Even writing that sentence brings us out in a rage. That said, we've long sought a chance to view the exhibition
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