Ever since supermarkets started filling their shelves with Christmas foodstuffs in September, view-on-demand has allowed us to watch "It's a Wonderful Life" when we choose rather than when the schedulers dictate and global warming robbed Europe of all its snow, it has become increasingly difficult to judge just when Christmas is due. Is it next week? Or do I have time before I start panicking about buying presents? Is that man dressed as Santa celebrating Halloween? Or is not a man dressed as
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The history of furniture design has an unignorable, if subtle and background, Hungarian accent; Marcel Breuer was one of the driving forces at Bauhaus and through his work with steel tubing, moulded plywood and sheet steel he helped advance ideas of contemporary furniture design, and continues to inspire; Paul László was one of the genuine pioneers of American industrial design and contributed to George Nelson's first Hermann Miller collection in 1948; and while Ernő Goldfinger may be best
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We were first introduced to the work of Berlin based designer Uli Budde when we saw his "Reading Table" project at Designers Fair 2010 in Cologne. A delightfully simple object Reading Table combines table top and magazine/newspaper storage space in a manner that is as painfully obvious as it genial. An easily accessible, contemporary object the fact that no producer has seen fit to take it into production is one of those design mysteries which often keep us awake at night. Having begun his
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Before Fritz Haller achieved international recognition for the USM modular furniture system, he was........ a steel construction system! USM Construction System Haller, as represented in a USM advert from 1971 Born in Solothurn, Switzerland on October 23rd 1924, the young Fritz Haller trained as a draughtsman before gaining architectural experience in the offices of various Swiss architects. In 1948 Fritz Haller travelled to Rotterdam where he spent a year working in the office of the Dutch
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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The WA 24 table lamp by Wilhelm Wagenfeld is without question one of the most instantly recognisable pieces of Bauhaus design, so much so that it is often referred to as simply "the Bauhaus Lamp". Designed by Wilhelm Wagenfeld in 1923 the WA 24 was quickly followed by a series of variations on the theme, yet all maintaining the same pared-down grace and uncomplicated functional elegance of the original. Characteristics which can just as easily be applied to Bauhaus itself as to Wagenfeld's
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Established in Brussels in 2011 by the French born, Belgian based craftsmen Jean Angelats and Jonathan Renou, Ateliers J&J released their inaugural collection in 2013. Presenting a range of domestic furnishing items crafted from bent tubular steel and solid wood Ateliers J&J's Collection 01 did nothing particularly innovative - and did it with a self-assured grace and composure that raised it far above the average and reminded us all just how enriching honestly conceived, well-proportioned,
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If form follows function, what form does, could, should yearning and longing have? If architects are continually searching for a form that meets our individual understanding of the physical environment, what form does, could, should our individual emotional yearnings and longings have? Do we want our yearnings to have a form? Or are we not, perhaps, when all is said and done, happier when they remain abstract and unreachable? The seventh edition of Vitra Frankfurt's biennial Ampelphase
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"The essence of the Thonetschen invention is that when bending a steamed piece of wood the neutral layer is relocated to the upper, convex, surface of the curved wood. If any cylindrical or prismatic body is bent, the upper layers are extended, the lower, concave, layer compressed, so shortened, and only one layer, namely that which passes through the centre of mass of the cross section, remains in the original length. Thus in this type of ordinary wood bending the upper, convex, lying part is
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On Thursday June 11th the 2015 DMY International Design Festival opens its doors to the public, and Berlin will once again be the focus of the global design community. But is Berlin the creative city many assume it to be? Beats the creative heart genuinely with a different rhythm, and with more fervour, on the banks of the Spree than elsewhere? Or is "Berlin Design" just a nice bit of location marketing behind which stands little more than non-stop parties and endless cheap lifestyle
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On March 10th 2015 a jury at the Central District Court of California in Los Angeles concluded that Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke had relied a little too heavily on Marvin Gaye's 1977 hit "Got to Give It Up" when composing their track "Blurred Lines". For infringement of Gaye's copyright the court ordered Williams and Thicke to pay Marvin Gaye's estate $7.4 million dollars. Responding to the judgement Pharrell Williams mused in the Financial Times that "the verdict handicaps any creator
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"The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler", confided the American author, ecologist and conservationist Aldo Leopold in his 1949 book "A Sand County Almanac", "The flash of his gold-and-blue plumage amid the dank decay of the June woods is in itself proof that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa." The following five new design and architecture exhibitions are our prothonotary warblers: proving as they, hopefully, do that abstract ideas
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To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Fritz Haller and Paul Schärer's USM Haller modular furniture system USM instigated a series of masterclasses in which students at seven international design schools were paired with a mentor and asked to "Rethink the Modular" and for all to "consider the significance of modularity in architecture and design" and so "exploit the idea of modularity for contemporary design". The results of the academic exercise were unveiled in an exhibition premièred during
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Several visitors to the Milan furniture fair with whom we spoke, including some whose judgement on such matters we value more than our own, were very excited by the new Uffici chair by Nitzan Cohen for Mattiazzi. We were, and remain, less convinced. Yes with its rigid, unyielding, duck bill-esque form and integrated mesh backrest we can see and understand that it is something new, something different. Yes, its mix of wood and synthetic weave is a nice interplay on two epochs of office chair
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It was invariably more through good fortune than good planning; however, at Milan Furniture Fair 2015 Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec's principle manufacturers were all sited next to one another. Good for Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec as it meant they didn't have so far to walk to get to their numerous appointments. And good for everyone else as it allowed for a very easy overview of the brothers' latest works. Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec's highest profile new launch at Milan Furniture Fair 2015 was
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Back in the hazy mists of 2014 the Grassi Museum for Applied Arts, Leipzig presented Sitting – Lying – Swinging. Furniture from Thonet, an exhibition which provided a leisurely stroll through 150 years of Thonet chair design and helped explain the evolution of the company's designs over the decades, including why Thonet lost their way in the 1980s and how from the late 1990s onwards they regained their position as one of Europe's leading contemporary furniture producers. And an exhibition
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In the late 19th/early 20th century Vienna based J & J Kohn helped establish the Austro-Hungarian Empire as an important centre for contemporary furniture design, advanced the careers of leading Wiener Secession era designers such as Josef Hoffmann, Otto Prutscher or Adolf Loos, as well as helping lay the foundations for the commercial furniture industry as we know it today. And while we're not going to forecast such a grand future for Brussels based Ateliers J&J, or at least not yet, from
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Upon seeing Rui Alves's Bridge armchair prototype at IMM Cologne 2015 we commented on the unfamiliar, and for us not instantly accessible, overproportioned upholstered seat and backrest...... Before realising in context of both the Pocket Chair by Jesper Junge and the Lenz Lounge Chair by Bartmann Berlin, Silvia Terhedebrügge & Hanne Willmann, that possibly Rui was just riding the Zeitgeist a lot better than us and that the overproportioned aesthetic had a contemporary relevance we were unaware
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For reasons far too abstract, intangible, and potentially libellous, to go into, we didn't report on the inaugural presentation of USM's new Privacy Panels staged during Orgatec Cologne 2014. Fortunately, and no doubt buoyed by the success of the Cologne presentation, USM are also presenting the Privacy Panels in Milan. When Fritz Haller developed his modular office furniture system for USM it's ability to divide internal spaces in a responsive and functional yet reduced and unobtrusive
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"I am rather silent, resolute and industrious. I can use any tool or machinery with dexterity." So described a 21 year old, and apparently extremely self-confident, Harry Bertoia himself on his application for Cranbrook Academy of Art. That the boast was anything other than hollow is something Harry Bertoia was to go on to prove. Repeatedly and in many fields. Harry Bertoia 1915 - 1978 (Photo courtesy of Knoll International) Born in San Lorenzo, Italy on March 10th 1915 Arieto Bertoia moved
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Established in 1993 with a primary focus on producing the designs of Egon Eiermann, including most famously the re-edition of Eiermann's 1953 table frame, Stuttgart based furniture manufacturer Richard Lampert have quietly developed over the intervening twenty plus years into one of Germany's most distinctive and idiosyncratic furniture producers, and a manufacturer with a portfolio that effortlessly mixes contemporary design with older, established, pieces. Often in the same object. Whereas
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In our post from the exhibition Schrill Bizarr Brachial. Das Neue Deutsche Design der 80er Jahre at the Bröhan Museum Berlin we noted that, for us, the two most important legacies of the Neues deutsches Design movement and 1980s German Postmodernism are and were the number of protagonists from then currently teaching at German design schools, and those manufacturers who arose from the heady, damp haze of the period. Manufacturers such as Nils Holger Moormann. Established in the early 1980s
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Contrary to popular legend, a change is not as good as a rest. It's better. For whereas after a rest one just carries on ploughing the same furrow, change means new experiences and the gorgeous, invigorating, uncertainty of not knowing where the new path will take you. After neigh on 18 years of producing refreshingly individual objects from sheet steel, and sheet steel alone, in 2014 Augsburg based Müller Möbelfabrikation began a flirtation with wood in context of their Stack sideboard/room
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If you're of a certain age, and of a certain background, you'll be familiar with the Roland TR-808 drum machine. If not, introduced in 1980 the Roland TR-808 was one of the first programmable drum machines, was, as such, a major influence on the development of electronic music in the 1980s..... and is infamous for sounding absolutely nothing like real drums, far less real percussion. Consequently, on account of its universally acknowledged auditory failings, the TR-808 was only produced for
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