"The fact that you are European allows you to be quirky. Europe has a great reputation for good design but that is just the ante to the game, and allows you then to be interesting, but you also have execute." BuzziJungle by Jonas Van Put for BuzziSpace, as seen at NeoCon Chicago 2016 Established in 2007 as a producer of office acoustic solutions, the Belgian manufacturer BuzziSpace has quickly grown to become not only one of the major producers of acoustic products but of what one could
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Although geographically the (hi)story of Vitra begins in Basel, spiritually it begins in America and arrives in Switzerland in 1957 with the licences to produce works by US designers such as Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, Isamu Noguchi and Alexander Girard; and then grows over the subsequent decades under the influence of the close co-operations which thus developed, for all those with George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames. Given this close affinity with and to America it was perhaps
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Born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a town famous for some 150 years as a, if not the, centre of American furniture production, it is perhaps not surprising that Tom Newhouse choose to pursue a career in furniture design. Upon graduating in 1972 from the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Tom Newhouse took up a position as a staff designer with Herman Miller, a situation he himself refers to as a "marvellous beginning", before in 1978 he established his
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Being principally an office furniture fair NeoCon doesn't really attract "fringe events" the way home furnishing focussed trade fairs do; office furniture, allegedly, lacking much of the flair, emotion and excitement of its domestic relatives. In the past however the so-called Guerrilla Truck Show did attempt to provide an alternative, more independent, take on design, than the sanitised corporate vision presented at NeoCon. Staged during NeoCon week in Chicago's Fulton Market district the
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At the risk of getting political, the term "neoconservative"/"neocon" hasn't always had the best reputation, especially not in Europe where its connotations of American supremacy through military force has long made it a subject for suspicion, intrigue and popular rejection. Thus for us it is all the more amusing that one of America's main contemporary furniture trade fairs should be "NeoCon". The imagery the name conjures up easily keeping us amused for the duration of a transatlantic
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