Imagine you spent your entire career researching and developing modular building systems. Imagine you gave the world radical new approaches to construction design and helped introduce the use of computer technology in architecture. And then imagine that most people only know your name in connection with one office furniture system. An office furniture system that you developed once as part of one contract for one company based in one small village in Switzerland. A system that despite its
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At the same time as he was developing the Ant Chair, Arne Jacobsen created a one-off range of office furniture that arguably represents the first tangible evidence of his move away from the natural materials and traditional handicrafts of his pre-war furniture and onto the mixed media, industrial products that have ultimately come to define his work. And so can truly be considered great lost furniture design classics. Not least because they really are lost! In 1951/52 - the records are a
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You don't have to be a globetrotting design specialist to know that the Danes invented light, uncomplicated wooden furniture with free flowing organic forms. It's just one of those acknowledged truths we can all trot out at cocktail parties. Which makes it all the more surprising that the apparent counter-evidence should be found in the Danish Museum of Art and Design in Copenhagen. The Temple to Denmark's design history. While giving full credit to the museum for presenting Børge
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Irritating as they are, forgers are rarely daft. You only very occasionally find one purveying, for example, fake Billy Ray Cyrus albums. Or fake Greek State Bonds. They prefer to stick to things they are certain they can sell with ease. Which is why Bauhaus furniture is so highly regarded by professional forging gangs. Not only is everyone familiar with the important pieces, but it all looks so simple. Who can tell the difference? However, aside from the potential safety issues, a copy
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Browsing through the catalogue for the exhibition "Der Stuhl" in Stuttgart one item in particular caught our attention: "Der Federdreh by Albert Stoll, Waldshut (Baden)" - and not just because it is a delightful piece of woodworking. Loosely translated as "The Sprung Swivel" Der Federdreh does what it promises - swivels and has spring suspension. Might not sound that interesting, but back then Der Federdreh was the very first chair of its kind. Anywhere. Consequently Der Federdreh is, in
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Without wanting to sound too much like Dieter Rams, good design really, really doesn't have to be complicated or otherwise outrageous. One of the best examples of this is without question the coat hook system Knax from LoCa. Created by Thomas Harrit and Nicolai Sørensen the idea couldn't be any simpler nor the effect any more liberating. Through the integration of a series of self-retracting metal hooks in a piece of wood one creates a hanging system that takes up virtually no space, even
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Back in January Benjamin Hubert was awarded the A&W Audi Mentorpreis 2012. Presented in conjunction with the A&W Designer of the Year Award the Mentorpreis can in many ways be considered as being the "Young Designer" category. The interesting aspect of the A&W Audi Mentorpreis is that the winner is nominated by that year's A&W Designer of the Year. So in 2012 Patricia Urquiola. After the award ceremony we caught up with Benjamin for a quick chat; however, we very cleverly managed to lose the
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Back in January we published a post looking at IMM Cologne 1962 and setting that year's exhibition in the context of what we could all expect at IMM Cologne 2012. Amongst the material we read and reviewed in preparing the post the page that made the biggest impression on us was an advert for Sesam-Bar by Oeseder Möbel-Industrie: a small corner unit containing a rotating interior compartment with bookshelves on the front and a mini-bar on the back. The name coming of course from "Open Sesame":
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"The exhibition will principally present simple, functional and comfortable chairs for the home, office and garden"1 With this clear note of intent opens the catalogue to the exhibition "Der Stuhl" that took place in Stuttgart from September 15th until October 15th 1928. Organised by the Württembergische Gewerbeamt - the trade office responsible for the greater Stuttgart region at that time - "Der Stuhl" featured some 400 objects from over 50 international producers and was conceived with
read moreIf there is a chair on the market at the moment that better symbolises how complex simplicity in design is than Pressed Chair by Harry Thaler for Moormann. We want to see it. At Milan 2011 Nils Holger Moormann told us of the literal and figurative mountain pass that had to be negotiated before Harry's idea could be transformed into a market ready, mass producible product. Then ahead of Milan 2012 Harry Thaler then told us about the long way from the original experiments with wood until he had
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Our views on Chemnitz are well known. Travel south of Chemnitz however and you'll come to an area of Germany that time didn't so much forget - it never even knew it existed. A bit like Bhutan, the Erzgebirge is an autonomous, inaccessible mountain region where the dearth of contact with the outside world means that popular knowledge about the area is largely dominated by myth, legend and the yellowing, travel logbooks of gentleman explorers of centuries gone. It is therefore all the more
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Remaining in celebratory mood..... Twenty five years after the young guns of European modernism gathered in Stuttgart to open the Weissenhof Siedlung, a "somewhat ageing" Danish architect, who as a student had been greatly influenced by the works of European modernism, was about to make his global breakthrough with a chair design which as much as any represents the post-War break with modernism and the fearless march into the new, uncertain, world. Happy 60th Birthday the Ant Chair by Arne
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If we're honest when we initially saw Speiseschrank by Nadin Jahn at the Bauhaus University Weimar 2012 Diploma exhibition we kept on walking. It just didn't tickle us. Didn't seem that interesting or relevant. But when we approached it a second time we stopped and considered it properly. Thankfully! Back in the day fruit and vegetables were stored in cellars, garages and similar naturally cool, dark spaces. Today they are stored in heated kitchens and as most of us only go shopping once a
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Back in April we asked Pascal Berberat, Head of the Vitra Airport Division why airport seating always has armrests. And thus denies us all the chance to lie down and snooze. A flippant question we concede, but such issues of course take on a very real significance when your flight is delayed and you find yourself with an unexpected overnight stay in the airport. What ya gonna do? Currently airports have either nothing to offer, meaning passengers have to find a way to make themselves
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One of the objects that has been following us around the international designer furniture circus this past year or so has been Flatmate by Michael Hilgers. The idea is very simple. Much like the chair project "The Half" by Studio Sailing to Mars, Flatmate takes the standard storage sideboard we all know - and reduces its dimensions. And in doing so creates a very familiar object in an equally unfamiliar scale. Unlike "The Half" the reduction is not geared towards ergonomic efficiency but
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Green Lamp by Zuzanna Malinowska is essentially a plant pot with an integrated growing frame. Clearly intended for climbing plants, the beauty of the growing frame is that it is a lamp shade. And below the lamp shade is, naturally enough, a bulb. The plant grows, takes on the form of the growing frame and before you know it you have a lamp formed from a plant. Now we are assuming that Zuzanna has checked and the plant can't get burned by the bulb; or indeed catch fire. And if she has, then
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The history of furniture design is strewn with works that briefly graced the public stage before vanishing without the honour of a curtain call. Crawl through the cellar of any major furniture producer and you'll find them; the perfectly mummified remains of genuine design classics that failed to transform their creative majesty into hard cash. Such as the so-called "Girard Group" by Alexander Girard. Although best known for his textile and wallpaper designs Alexander Girard wasn't averse to
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We were famously first drawn to the work of Belgian designer Tim Baute aka Interror.be via a lamp he showed at Designers Fair Cologne 2010. And his SevenUp, a moody and reduced down chandelier, remains one of our reference products. Tim is however a metalworker by training and so it was good to see him presenting a new steel product range for his debut at DMY Berlin. And although named after the B-2 Bomber, the range doesn't have its origins in the secretive world of military aviation, but
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When all's said and done Marcel Breuer's 1927 Wassily Chair is nothing more than a couple of bits of material stretched over a metal frame. Giandomenico Belotti's 1960 Spaghetti Chair is nothing more than some PVC cord stretched over a metal frame And so on first impressions there is nothing new about "Upholstered Chair" by Jooyeon Lee. Damn those first impressions............... Created as her Diploma project at the Aalto University Helsinki, "Upholstered Chair" is a lounger created from
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Older readers will remember our fascination and admiration for Scolyt by Marco Merkel after we saw it at the UdK Berlin Rundgang 2011. Marco has now developed things a little further, reduced the scale and is presenting the project at DMY Berlin 2012. We're still lovin' it. And not just because of the beauty of the end results. But because of the thinking and process behind the project. We're fairly certain there is absolutely no useful application of the process, other than creating such
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One of the reasons we've never got on well with trends is because ultimately he who shouts loudest is perceived as being the best, most innovative or most important. DMY Berlin 2012 demonstrates that is not the case. While in Hangar 4 the main sponsor screams his marketing budget at full volume; about 40 metres away two FH Potsdam graduates are quietly presenting much more interesting and socially relevant objects. And much as we'd like to proclaim that their minimal, non-intrusive stand
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Egon Eiermann allegedly once began work on a series of coffins for a Berlin funeral company. The series was sadly never realised, but we can well imagine in which direction Eiermann would have gone.... On the Farmer's Creativity by Agri-expo Yunlin stand at DMY Berlin 2012 is an object that approaches the subject with a little more agility. Return by Sa' Bella Design / Sally Lin is an urn. An urn made of recycled paper, the walls of which are impregnated with seeds. As the paper
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144th birthdays aren't occasions all celebrate; however, because Charles Rennie Mackintosh ties in so nicely with so many of the themes we've covered in the past weeks it seems like an occasion we can't ignore. Born in Glasgow on June 7th 1868 Charles Rennie Mackintosh trained as an architect with John Hutchinson before moving to the larger company Honeyman & Keppie following his qualification in 1889. In 1890 Mackintosh was given his first solo project, designing an extension for the back
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We're almost at the end of our Milan 2012 coverage. Not because we've run out of themes; but have run out of time. In the coming weeks we've got the opening of the Gerrit Rietveld exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum, the opening of the Marcel Breuer Exhibition at Bauhaus Dessau, Belgrade Design Week, DMY Berlin, Design Miami Basel, and all in addition to a couple of further interviews in connection with "British Design" at the V&A London and "Bauhaus: Art as Life" at the Barbican Art
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