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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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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At the 1949 Copenhagen Carpenters Guild exhibition Hans J. Wegner presented his JH501 "Round Chair" for Johannes Hansen. Often referred to simply as "The Chair", for many its basic yet expressive form reflecting perfection in chair design, the JH501 was the work with which Hans J. Wegner first reached a mass public and is in many ways the work that first established the international reputation of Danish design and which made Danish furniture "hip". Among those who saw the JH501 at the 1949
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Whereas, generally speaking, those designers we feature in these pages have trained as either an architect or carpenter, Jean Prouvé was a blacksmith. Or more correctly a ferronniers d'art. An ornamental blacksmith. A training that was to give him a singular perspective on the challenges of the age, on aesthetics, on the question of industrial versus artisan production and which endows him and his work with a unique place in the history of European architecture and design. He is also the only
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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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The weekend April 4th to April 6th 2014 sees the 3rd annual "European Artistic Crafts Days". Organised by the French National Institute of Arts and Crafts (INMA), the Journées Européennes des Métiers d’Art will be celebrated with untold events, workshops, open days and exhibitions in Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Great Britain, Latvia, Hungary and Portugal. And by us through the candleholder Medallion by Gonçalo Campos & Maria Bruno Néo for Portuguese brand Vicara, a new product
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Born on April 2nd 1914 Hans Jørgensen Wegner is without question one of the most important designers of the so-called Danish Modern movement. Works such as the Peacock Chair from 1947, the 1949 JH501, an object often referred to simply as "The Chair" or his 1949 CH24 Wishbone Chair, his best selling creation, largely helping define Danish design in the 1940s and 1950s. Golden decades that still dominate the public persona of the Danish design tradition. Hans Jørgensen Wegner is equally
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April 2014, as every April we can ever remember, means Milanese purgatory. Apparently it is meant to cleanse the soul, purify our thoughts and generally mitigate for the sins of the past, and so allow us to proceed to higher plains and greater virtues. And boy must we have sinned. We can't remember exactly when, far less how. We just hope we enjoyed it at the time. Because now we are paying. When, if, we return these are the new design exhibitions we're planning on visiting to help us
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If we were to be completely honest we would have to admit that although we were aware of the name "Ferdinand Kramer", it wasn't until Frankfurt based manufacturer e15 launched a series of Kramer re-editions at Milan 2012 that we actually paid any serious attention to the man and his work. Something we are very thankful for. Born in Frankfurt in 1898 Ferdinand Kramer undertook a foundation architecture course in Munich before joining Bauhaus Weimar in 1919. Disillusioned by the lack of a
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One of the first telephone calls Mateo Kries and Marc Zehntner made upon assuming leadership of the Vitra Design Museum in 2011 was to Konstantin Grcic to discuss the possibility of an exhibition. Grcic was, in principle, open to the idea, but, "I didn't want a static exhibition, something that froze my work in time, rather I wanted something dynamic" That "something dynamic" is the exhibition Konstantin Grcic - Panorama which opened at the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein on Friday March
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It is a universally acknowledged fact that men only buy Playboy to read the articles. And we only visited the exhibition "Playboy Architecture, 1953-1979" at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt in order to, to, to, tttoooooooo see the Eames DCW that is on display.....mmmm...... its not a chair you see that often..... aaahhh......mmmmmmmm..... or the Bertoia Diamond Chair? [Audible nervous cough. Depart stage left.] Originating from a project by students at Princeton University
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As the prevailing design ideology in post-War Germany die gute Form almost single handedly established the modern German design tradition, and so by extrapolation was responsible for defining the popular understanding of "German Design" Loosely translatable as "good form", gute Form can be considered as reducing an object, building or anything really down to its very essentials, of creating "a natural product, developed from its function and technical requirements, that in its form represents
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On Friday March 14th blickfang Stuttgart opens its doors to the public for the 22nd edition of the consumer design fair. Inaugurated in Stuttgart in 1992 by "a couple of “"fools"" - their words, not ours - blickfang has gone on to grow beyond its native city and can now be found throughout the year in locations as varied and widespread as Basel, Zürich, Copenhagen, Vienna, Hamburg and, most recently, Munich. Blickfang Stuttgart remains however a special occasion. In addition to the usual mix
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"It is simple to prove that despite all distractions to the contrary from the cultural community in western Germany that also in the area of industrial design no real, definitive, new impetus can be expected; the foundation for such is missing and the wheel of development is being turned back, advancement stopped and that regardless if Germany - and the future in general - is thereby endangered..... We, the artists of the German Democratic Republic, are the opinion that owing to our
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The North wind doth blow and we shall have snow, And what will poor robin do then, poor thing? He'll sit in a barn and keep himself warm And hide his head under his wing, poor thing. Or, and much more sensibly, take himself off and visit one of the new design exhibitions opening during March. And so not only keep himself warm but also informed, entertained and inspired. Our selection from the new, robin friendly, openings in March features an homage to East German concrete architecture in
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The first post in our, hopefully short, new series "Things we missed at IMM Cologne 2014" is devoted to the new Pegasus Home Desk by Ippolito Fleitz Group / Tilla Goldberg for Munich based manufacturer ClassiCon. We know why we missed it in Cologne, call it youthful arrogance, we just can't believe we did. Not only does the Pegasus Home Desk exude a formal parity with a horse saddle, but it functions as a sort of home office saddle bag - the leather desk top can be rolled up from the left
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Until April 16th the DMY Design Gallery Berlin is presenting the exhibition "Lifetimes" by Berlin based designer Birgit Severin. The inaugural exhibition in the new DMY Design Gallery. Following the demise of the "original" DMY Gallery in Berlin's stilwerk "design shopping centre", DMY appeared to have decided to concentrate on their global series of exhibitions and running Germany's most important design contest, the Designpreis der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Silence can however be
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In 1982 Danish furniture manufacturer Fritz Hansen acquired the rights to the complete works by the designer Poul Kjærholm. In 2003 Fritz Hansen ceded their rights to selected objects, mainly tables. In January 2014 Fritz Hansen reacquired said rights from Poul Kjærholm's son Thomas Kjærholm who had not only administered the rights in the intervening decade, but had also established a company who produced and distributed the "discarded" objects. Although the decision to reacquire the
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By way of an addendum to our addendum to our "5 New Design Exhibitions for February 2014" post...... Until June 8th 2014 the Villa Esche in Chemnitz is presenting a special exhibition devoted to the artist and industrial designer Marianne Brandt. Built in 1903 by Henry van de Velde for the Chemnitz textile magnate Herbert Eugen Esche, the Villa Esche is not only a wonderful example of Henry van de Velde's approach to architecture and his understanding of his responsibilities in context of the
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"One of the typical activities in modern architecture has been the construction of chairs and the adoption of new materials and new methods for them. The tubular steel chair is surely rational from technical and constructive points of view: It is light, suitable for mass production, and so on. But steel and chromium surfaces are not satisfactory from the human point of view. Steel is too good a conductor of heat. The chromium surface gives too bright reflections of light, and even acoustically
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By way of an addendum to our "5 New Design Exhibitions for February 2014" post.... The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is currently showing "Pinned Up at the Stedelijk, 25 years of design", the first major retrospective of the work of Dutch designer Marcel Wanders. Presenting over 400 objects the exhibition promises to cover Marcel Wanders' complete career since the release of the Set Up Shades lamp in 1989 and in doing so present a chance to better understand the man, his thinking and his works.
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"In the development and designing of furniture one prevailing problem is the means for securing parts of the furniture together particularly when the parts are made of thin materials such as plywood or metal. This problem is particularly difficult when a certain amount of twisting or give between the parts is desired so as to provide resiliency to one of the parts. In general efforts to solve this problem have failed."1 So begins a patent application filed by Charles Eames on 28th July 1958.
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