Mayday! Mayday! Don't panic. It's just a public holiday. You'll survive. Barbecue something...... And afterwards, when everyone else is back at work and things have calmed down a little, why not enjoy one or more of the following design and architecture exhibitions opening around Europe this coming May. "Fritz Haller. Architekt und Forscher" at the S AM Schweizerisches Architekturmuseum, Basel, Switzerland Everyone knows Fritz Haller. He designed one of the few truly iconic and genuinely
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The best form of recycling is not to produce things in the first place. However, until every one understands that, things will continue to be produced in senseless quantities, and senseless quantities of things will eventually reach the end of their useful life. And then? Largely, though not exclusively, based on projects submitted for the annual Recycling Designpreis, the exhibition "Transformations - Concepts of Re-using Things" currently showing at the Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge in
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"What is the Paris Exposition?", asked Roger Gilman in the September 1925 edition of The Art Bulletin, "It is a new world of the applied arts. It is a new world of reality, reality in the square mass of concrete construction, reality in the smooth surfaces of machine products, reality in wonderful new materials offered by our mastery of science and transport, reality in the severe plainness of our practical age, reality in a marvellous effort to design everything and copy nothing. And it is a
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Standing in the shadow of his gargantuan lamp, "The Worker", Pascal Howe is well aware of how easily his work can be misunderstood. "Many people think it is just a lifestyle product or similar", he smiles, "but it has a strong concept behind it and isn't just about the aesthetic, the material or the functionality" The exhibition "Pascal Howe - VDI 2860" at the DMY Design Gallery Berlin is part of process to correct such misinterpretations and to introduce the real Pascal Howe. Following a
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Milan is awash with churches. Milan is awash with monasteries. Basilica. Friaries. And other suitable locations for submitting penitence. We go to Salone Satellite. Last year you may remember we had to apologise to Karolin Fesser for our failure to publish a post on the from Karolin co-curated Objects for the neighbour exhibition. Not that we were obliged to publish anything on the exhibition; it was just so good it deserved one and we were negligent in not doing such. This year it was
read more"We have a World's Fair opening in New York again today and it will, as always with fairs, offer the opportunity for looking forward into the future and backward into the past", announced the New York Times on April 22nd 1964 with the unmistakable self-confident bluff of a journalist racing to meet a deadline and struggling to make the patently obvious sound anything but. Although not officially sanctioned as a "World's Fair" the 1964/65 New York World's Fair attracted some 66 nations -
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Parallel to the exhibition Konstantin Grcic - Panorama, the Vitra Design Museum is revisiting perhaps the daddy of all explorations of our possible futures, Verner Panton's 1970 Visiona 2 exhibition. Lacking a three story Rhine cruiser on which to present the complete exhibition, the Vitra Design Museum are instead presenting a recreation of the fabled Fantasy Landscape installation from Visiona 2 in the Vitra Design Museum gallery. A recreation which one can enter and so experience with all
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One of the stand out objects for us in the Young Perspectives exhibition shown in Boffi's Cologne flagship store during Cologne Design Week 2014 was the clothes stand Blanche by Frankfurt based Meike Langer. And so it was a real joy not only to be reacquainted with Blanche in Milan, but to see Blanche's new shoes. Or more precisely put, new foot. Crafted from ash and steel tubing Blanche has an abstract trombone feel about it and is, in many ways, a refinement of the excellent Beaugars
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Standing in the Leipzig Grassi Museum for Applied Arts, surrounded by 150 years of Thonet chair history, Peter Thonet, x-times-great grandson of company founder Michael Thonet and until his recent retirement company CEO, is clearly a very satisfied man, "It makes one proud to be able to look back on a collection of objects that have not only been important for the company, but which have also, occasionally, written design history" Few visiting the new Grassi Museum exhibition "Sitting – Lying
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One could be facetious and say that organising an exhibition looking at "the creative potential triggered by crises in the history of Italy" is akin to organising an exhibition presenting an unbroken chronology of Italian creative potential since time immemorial. But that is exactly what the Triennale Design Museum Milan have undertaken for their seventh edition. Under the title "Autarky, Austerity, Autonomy" the Triennale Design Museum have, however, chosen to focus on just three periods of
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If we're honest, we really, really, should have seen it coming. We didn't. Having been acquired in 2013 by Vitra, Artek have now begun working with leading designers from the Vitra roster. Specifically, in Milan Artek launched a new chair from Konstantin Grcic and new colour and textile schemes from Hella Jongerius for the classic Alvar Aalto 400 and 401 armchairs and Stool 60. We just hope no-one is tempted to over egg this particular pudding. In the Milan press release Artek CEO Mirkku
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In design the term "readymade" is used to refer to products created by giving existing objects a new function; generally a new function far, far removed from the original. Examples of the genre include the Mezzadro stool fashioned from a tractor seat by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Jasper Morrison's 1983 Handlebar Table or David Olschewski's Clothes Peg Lamp, an object that never reached the fame of the previous two examples. But which is and was every bit as interesting. Berlin
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"We are red, we are white, we are Danish dynamite!" So sang the Danes their national football team to victory at the 1992 UEFA Euro tournament. Another example of "Danish Dynamite" is/was on display at Ventura Lambrate as part of the Design School Kolding's Milan 2014 show. If we were slick professionals we'd now say something along the lines of, and it isn't red and white. But green!!! Created by Interaction Designer Alexander Muchenberger and essentially nothing more technically advanced
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Preparing for his solo exhibition "Pinned Up at the Stedelijk, 25 years of design" clearly helped Marcel Wanders tackle, and defeat, his inner demons. We can find no other explanation for the transformation from the darkness of Moooi's 2013 Milan show to the lighter, happier, untroubled, feel of 2014's. The formats were and are essentially the same, both based around room contexts backdropped by large format photos of heavily stylised spaces, but whereas last year's presentation was a
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"Modern office chairs can be like machines, very technical. We wanted to create something a little softer, more human." So explains Ronan Bouroullec the background thinking to the new Uncino chair by the brothers Bouroullec for Italian manufacturer Mattiazzi. According to Ronan the path from the commission from Mattiazzi for an office chair to Uncino was "quite slow", but was obviously worth it, resulting as it has in a truly fascinating and engaging object. Available in either a static
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Exhibitions in which designers present objects that inspire them are nothing new. But are by their very nature exhibitions that are always new. No two being the same. A fact that always makes them worth visiting. During Milan Design Week the Kaleidoscope Project Space is showing "Source Material", the latest such exhibition. Presenting objects submitted by 45 creatives from across a range of genres, Source Material claims to be an exploration of how the creative process is both "informed by
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As regular readers will be aware, unlike The Kinks we are no dedicated followers of fashion. Millinery is another matter altogether. There is little that excites us quite as much as a good hat. And so we were obviously instantly taken by what we took to be an over sized Fes on Cologne designer Thomas Schnur's stand at Salone Satellite. It was of course not a Fes but "Felt Stool", one of Thomas's newer projects. And a project that is exactly what it claims to be. A stool made of felt. Not
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Older readers will remember how last year one of the Vitra Senior Manager's quoted from this blog in his pre-fair pep talk to the assembled Team Vitra. Having reached the zenith of our careers we contemplated retiring. Fortunately we didn't. For at Milan 2014 Vitra have re-issued objects from a collection of Alexander Girard furniture designs that featured in our July 2012 "Lost Furniture Design Classics" post. OK not the furniture pieces we referred to, but objects from the same
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"With Milan design week, as with life", we noted in our Milan Design Week 2014 preview, "the best, most interesting, most enjoyable discoveries are invariably to be made on the by-ways. And often as the result of spontaneous, unconsidered, chance, decisions." And so it came to pass. On the Sunday before Milan design week we were busy completing all those important, unacknowledged, thankless, tasks without which this all wouldn't be possible, when by pure chance we walked past the Milan
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Many people, if not peoples, could currently be forgiven for reacting somewhat sceptically to the notion of a “Happy Future”. With their exhibition “Happy Future” Dutch design collective Dutch Invertuals take on this scepticism and aim to show that the basic ingredients for such are there; we just need to identify and use them correctly. Established in 2009 Dutch Invertuals is a loose collective of designers, largely but not exclusively with a Design Academy Eindhoven background, who
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Until April 27th Depot Basel are presenting the exhibition Okolo Offline. Documenting the first five years of Prague based design collective Okolo, aka Jakub Štěch, Adam Štěch, Jan Kloss and Matěj Činčera, the exhibition presents 25 posts from the Okolo blog - www.okoloweb.cz - in a gallery installation: from Moebius for Hermés to Anatomy of ČZ via rulers and set squares, Meiss ski goggles or "Recent Japanese Inspirations", the digital world is made tangible as objects, books, posters and
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As we noted in our review of the book "WEGNER – Just one good chair", Hans J. Wegner spent a large proportion of his career seeking to perfect and improve his chair designs. "If only you could design just one good chair in your life . . .", he mused in 1952, "But you simply cannot" Similarly for Egon Eiermann the "Chair of his Life" was always the next chair design. While Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was famously of the opinion that designing a chair was more complicated than building a
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"When I walk into a building I see space, light and colour", so explains the Finnish photographer Ola Kolehmainen his relationship to architecture. How Ola Kolehmainen visualises this triumvirate is currently being presented in the exhibition Geometric Light at the gallery Haus am Waldsee in Berlin. Born in Helsinki in 1964 Ola Kolehmainen originally studied journalism before completing an MA in photography at the University of Art and Design Helsinki. His passion for architecture
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"Okay so is there ANYTHING interesting happening in Milan this year?" asked dezeen founder and Editor in Chief Marcus Fairs in a recent tweet, "Judging by my inbox so far, the answer is no" The real answer of course is: ignore your inbox. As a Marcus Fairs must surely know. But which is admittedly easier said than done. With Milan design week, as with life, the best, most interesting, most enjoyable discoveries are invariably to be made on the by-ways. And often as the result of
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