Edition 33 as seen at Passagen Interior Design Week Cologne 2024 Established in Munich in 2020 by Max Neustadt, an alumni of the Technische Hochschule Rosenheim and ECAL, Lausanne, with periods working with Nils Holger Moormann and Stefan Diez on his CV, Edition 33 have a, for us, agreeably responsible and sustainable business model: new products are 'launched' but only actually produced, only actually become a component of the Edition 33 portfolio, once 33 orders have been received. We're
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The Augenwohl felt lamp by Dorothee Becker for Design M from the early 1970s, as seen at Dorothee Becker – aus dem persönlichen Nachlass, Passagen Interior Design Week Cologne 2024 Born in Aschaffenburg, Bayern, on March 30th 1938 into a family of small traders, her mother's family running a butchery, her father operating a drugstore, Dorothee Becker enjoyed, a, by all accounts, happy, comfortable, childhood on the Bavarian/Hessen border, if an early biography that is still to be fully told.
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Beetlechair by Alexander von Dombois, as seen at Passagen Interior Design Week Cologne 2024 There is an argument to be made, indeed one we will make here without offering any evidence, we'll save that for another day, there is an argument to be made that some of the earliest forbearers, if not the earliest forbearers, of our contemporary side chairs were three legged: the three-legged stool is an object known across time and geography and class, and there is a particularly satisfying,
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Chemical Connection by Karoline Fesser (in cooperation with Karl Weber), as seen at Siebter Himmel, Passagen Interior Design Week 2024 We're sure Karoline Fesser won't mind us observing that she is a seasoned regular at Cologne's Passagen Interior Design Week, having made her debut in, by our calculations, 2012; and if you do mind Karoline, sorry! But, we've gone done it now! Yet despite the regularity of her appearances, there is never a sense of déjà vu, never that dull lifeless in a room
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Since 1990 the annual IMM Cologne furniture fair has been accompanied by the Passagen Interior Design Week. A design week, a design festival, that, and although it is often a bit overly commercial for our tastes, also always features a nice mix of emerging and establishing designers, small platforms, design schools, and others removed from the more predictable, superficial, profit-orientated corners of the furniture and design industries. A mix of creatives who help remind what design, what
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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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Fortune, we are told, favours the brave. Misfortune the reckless, but fortune the brave. Thus, summing all the bravery we could muster, we descended into the unknown of the Bunker am Bahngleis and the exhibition Generation Köln.....* Karoline&Klemens&Thomas&Tim. Generation Köln @ Passagen Cologne 2019 As noted in context of Generation Cologne 2018, we're not huge fans of generic umbrella terms such as "Generation", finding them not only distracting and counter productive, but also
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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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As regular readers will appreciate, we're no great approvers of lumping individual creatives together under one umbrella term; always strikes us as being an unnecessary distraction, and (more than) a little counterproductive. We are however most appreciative that following an inaugural presentation at Kazerne Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week 2017, the showcase Generation Köln is now being presented, as it were, on home turf. Generation Köln. A Family Portrait Organised by Passagen
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One of Germany's leading post-war architects and architectural theoreticians, Egon Eiermann was also one of post-war Europe's most important chair designers, not just in context of what he realised, but also in context of what he worked towards realising and the reasons why. With the exhibition Cologne celebrate that legacy. Der Stuhl des Architekten - Sitzmöbel von Egon Eiermann @ Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft Cologne Although Egon Eiermann's career as a designer of
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With the exhibition 5 Years kaschkasch Florian Kallus and Sebastian Schneider aka studio kaschkasch celebrate, well, five years of studio kaschkasch. 5 Years kaschkasch, Cologne 5 Years kaschkasch The foundations for kaschkasch were laid by Florian Kallus and Sebastian Schneider in context of a joint graduation project at the Akademie für Gestaltung Münster, and became reality with the opening of their own studio in Cologne in 2011. An early diet of trade fairs and competitions resulting in
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The 1973 film Ceremony by Italian architecture group Superstudio features individuals who inhabit the "Invisible House", a house devoid of not only a physical structure but, we are told by the narrator, all forms of furniture. The inhabitants of the invisible house are happy. Despite this and their other regular very public pronunciations against architecture and design, from their earliest days Italian architecture group Superstudio also designed furniture and lighting: a selection of which
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Passagen Design Week Cologne 2017 is playing host to Naked Objects, the fifth edition of the exhibition series "Nieuwe German Gestaltung" - and an exhibition which as with the previous four is an unashamed celebration of the diversity and vitality of contemporary German product design. Naked Objects: Nieuwe German Gestaltung #005 Naked Objects - Nieuwe German Gestaltung #005 Tracing its origins to the 2009 exhibition “Nullpunkt. Nieuwe German Gestaltung” curated by the Belgian critic and
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With the exhibition 21 Common Things designer Thomas Schnur explores his personal relationship with everyday objects. And in doing so the concept of functionality. Thomas Schnur - 21 Common Things "The whole world's going home with blue plastic bags" observes Malcolm Middleton in his 2008 song, "Blue Plastic Bags" The blue plastic bag as a unifying object. The blue plastic bag as a metaphor for contemporary urban life. The blue plastic bag as a symbol of our social homogeneity. "The whole
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With the exhibition Full House: Design by Stefan Diez the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Cologne, MAKK, present the first museal overview of the canon of the German designer Stefan Diez. And an exhibition which in many respects also helps explain industrial design. Or at least the contemporary industrial design process. Yard by Stefan Diez for emu, as seen at FULL HOUSE: Design by Stefan Diez, Museum für Angewandte Kunst Cologne Full House: Design by Stefan Diez Born in 1971 into a
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2016 sees the 20th anniversary of German architecture and design magazine A&W's "Designer of the Year Award." Following on from previous recipients including Achille Castiglioni in 1997, Paola Navone in 2000, Gaetano Pesce in 2006 and more recently Werner Aisslinger in 2014 and Michele De Lucchi in 2015 the 20th recipient is Jasper Morrison. And that, joyously, means a Jasper Morrison exhibition during the 2016 Passagen Cologne interior design week. A&W Designer of the Year 2016 - Jasper
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There can be little argument that nature is, was and always will be the best designer, the most efficient designer: largely because nature never does anything unnecessary. Louis H. Sullivan, for example, saw the evidence that "form ever follows function" in the fact that "all things in nature have a shape, that is to say, a form, an outward semblance, that tells us what they are ... they are so characteristic, so recognizable, that we say, simply, it is “natural” it should be so"1; for the
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While the old adage "you are what you eat" can't be true, if it were we'd be a slovenly pile of beer and crisps, it is very true that you are how you cook. Cooking has largely developed with cultures, the way similar foodstuffs are prepared and cooked, for example, varying from region to region, and regardless of how technologically advanced society inevitably becomes, cooking will, we suspect, remain largely resistant to change. Cooking systems will evolve and adapt, but cooking processes
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Parallel to the exhibition MAD ABOUT LIVING – 24 Designers from Brussels, Cologne is hosting an exhibition which nicely highlights one of the major differences between Belgian designers and their Dutch colleagues in terms of designing furniture and other domestic products Whereas Belgian designers simply produce furniture, Dutch designers produce concepts. OK we're generalising, and to be fair we do know a lot, a few, some, Dutch designers who produce perfectly "normal" furniture. But for the
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If we're correctly informed, and let's be honest we're not always, 2014 saw the Belgian General Consulate in Cologne host their first Passagen Design Week exhibition with an excellent showcase of new and less new works by Atelier Bonk and Cas Moor. Buoyed by the success of that experience for Passagen 2015 the Consulate is hosting the exhibition MAD ABOUT LIVING - 24 Designers from Brussels. Organised by the Brussels regional creative promotion agency, MAD Brussels, and staged in the fire
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Much as we tend to shy away from "Designer of the Year" awards, the presentation of German architecture and design magazine A&W's Designer of the Year award is always an early highpoint of the Passagen Cologne Design Week. Principally because it invariably results in a compact yet informative exhibition from and about the selected designer. An exhibition that is perhaps never independent nor critical, but which always provides an accessible overview of the designers oeuvre. Following on from
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Following on from system design at the MAKK and the more autonomous product design featured at Objects in Between, we bring you an exhibition in Cologne presenting a third product design category: the collection. Whereas systems require a connector, a universal node, collections can be considered a series of related products which although created in the one context need not have a connection. Other than having been created in the same context. For their Passagen Cologne 2015 exhibition
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