"When I was very small, a little boy of five or six years old, I was certainly no infant prodigy, but I did do drawings with houses, with vases and flowers, with gypsy caravans, merry-go-rounds and cemeteries........"1 Thus began one of the more interesting design journeys of the twentieth century. Ettore Sottsass (Photo Barbara Radice, 1984 © and courtesy Studio Ettore Sottsass) Ettore Sottsass: From Architect to Designer Born In Innsbruck, Austria, on September 14th 1917 as the son of an
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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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Whereas the careers of most product and furniture designers follow a very similar path and pattern over apprenticeship, internships and college, Belgian designer Alain Gilles took a "somewhat" different route: a degree in political science being followed by five years working in the Brussels' office of international finance concern J P Morgan, before, aged 32, he began to study product design. And that with a fair degree of success. Since establishing his own studio in 2007 Alain Gilles has
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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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In our recent conversation with Birgit Severin and Guillaume Neu-Rinaudo about their Heimat Lamp project they told us that the lamp was not only their first joint project but in many ways a test joint project to see how well they cooperated. Or perhaps better put, if they could cooperate. And was a test which they obviously both passed, for at Salone Satellite 2016 in Milan Birgit and Guillaume presented new, joint, projects, and a new, joint, venture, the design studio "Proof of Guilt" For us
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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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We're not going to claim that DMY Berlin 2016 was a vintage year, for us the 14th edition of the international design festival featured too little of substance, too much superficial, too little original, too much that was too obvious and far, far, far too many intricate filigree light bulbs. And nothing says "lifestyle", or winds us up, more than an intricate, filigree light bulb. However our impression may have been partially clouded by the distraction caused by the large amount of open space
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As we believe is now traditional at this time of year..... ..... every year at Milan Design Week the Belgian Design authorities proclaim that Belgium is Design. And every year we respond, that it isn't. But is a country with an awful lot of very talented designers......... The "Belgium is Design" claim is however the principle reason we decided to investigate contemporary Belgian creativity in a little more detail, to investigate as it were how much truth stood behind it, and to be able to
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It's been a good long while since we last posted about the Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe's kkaarrlls collection, and thus ambling down Milan's Via Palermo towards the kkaarrlls 2016 Edition showcase we inevitably found ourselves querying why that should be....... Not least because ever since we stumbled by chance across the first kkaarrlls showcase at Milan 2009 it has been a project we have liked, enjoyed and followed. If latterly only from afar. Given how much we admire kkaarrlls, we
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Established in 2002 Danish label HAY have quickly risen to become an important player in the European furniture and home accessories market, and in many ways have also served as the archetype for the innumerable new labels that have sprung up across the continent in the last five to six years. Yet to judge by the scale, breadth and obvious cost of their presentation at Milan 2016 HAY are clearly not planning resting on their laurels any time soon: here is brand, we were informed, moving up a
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The Faculty of Applied Arts Schneeberg is by no stretch of the imagination Germany's largest design school; however, that in context of design education size is less important than how creativity is nurtured, supported and encouraged can currently be explored in the exhibition "Offspring – Graduates of Schneeberg present furniture and product design" at the GALERIE Rüdiger SchaackAngewandte Kunst Schneeberg in Schloss Lichtenwalde. Presenting works by eleven graduates from Schneeberg's Wood
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The question as to what "home" means has never been an easy one to answer, and in our global age of networked, anonymous, communities, our age of refugees and migrant workers, our age of abstract "Homeland Security" agencies, the question has in many ways become even more complicated. The Lamp Heimat (Homeland) by Berlin based designers Birgit Severin and Guillaume Neu-Rinaudo is an attempt to approach an answer. Birgit Severin and Guillaume Neu-Rinaudo met while studying at Design Academy
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As the name implies the Light + Building Trade Fair in Frankfurt is largely about architectural lighting rather than domestic lighting or office lighting; were it largely about the later it would be called "Light + Living" or "Light + Working" It's called Light + Building. And as such the biggest stands belong to company's you will never have never heard of unless you spend your days planning the construction of hotels, hospitals, shopping centres et al and searching for appropriate
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As a "consumer goods" trade fair devoted to tableware, accessories, gifts, light-bulbs with filigree filaments, and the like, Ambiente Frankfurt is not a trade fair to which we feel a particularly empathy. Indeed one could go as far as to say that with its hall upon hall of products who's reason for existence we question and the hollow echo of "Lifestyle", "Trend", "Innovation" and "Buy me! Buy me! Buy me and you'll rise to a social status you could previously never dream of attaining" which
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In our interview with Marcel Kabisch, founder of and creative force behind German label Feinserie, he told us that what interested him in design, and part of his motivation to study design, was the idea of "bringing a certain intelligence into a product", and of achieving "an efficiency in design" Principles which are elegantly displayed in his new Griffbereit Chair. In many ways an extension of an idea begun with his award winning Griffbereit Stool/Side Table, the Griffbereit Chair is formed
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Internationally known for its financial district, airport, financial institutions and sausages, Frankfurt am Main is less well understood as a city of design. Or at least not a city of contemporary design. That however wasn’t always the case. The 1920s and 30s saw the likes of Ernst May and Christian Dell help the city develop a reputation as a centre for modernist innovation, while the Viennese architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky gave it an internationally renowned kitchen concept in which to
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In the famous Thonet Card Catalogue from 1930/31 the image of the B 9 side table and B 25 lounge chair is augmented by a small lamp atop the B 9. Whereas the Thonet B 25 and Thonet B 9 are credited to Marcel Breuer, there is no credit for the lamp. But then it isn't a Thonet lamp. Thonet don't do lamps. Thonet do tables, chairs, shelving and other furniture. Thonet don't do lamps. Or at least didn't. In 2010 Thonet released the LUM reading lamp by Ulf Möller as a floor version, adding a desk
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In addition to the exhibition of their work in Cologne, the A&W Designer of the Year crown also allows the recipient to select one young designer for the so-called A&W Mentor Prize: essentially a chance to invite a young designer whose work they admire to share the spotlight with them. Previous mentees have included Stefan Diez, selected in 2005 by Richard Sapper, Oskar Zieta, selected in 2011 by Tokujin Yoshioka, and the very first mentee, Konstantin Grcic, selected by Achille Castiglioni in
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Back at Milan 2009 we stumbled by chance across "My Bauhaus is better than yours", an exhibition featuring works by a group of Bauhaus University Weimar students. Although not unimpressed by what we saw, indeed we remember finding one or the other project very good, the majority of the works were for us a little too "student", a little too obvious, which is not a criticism, it just meant we didn't feel the need to write about the exhibition. Seven years, and a legally obliged change of name
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2016 sees Augsburg based manufacturer Müller Möbelfabrikation celebrate their 20th anniversary, and to mark their round birthday the company have gifted themselves, and by extrapolation us all, a new round(er) form. Round(er) for despite their inherent quadraticness Müller Möbelfabrikation objects have always had a curvaceous soul; be that as expressed through the subtle contours of the grandiose TB 229 desk from the company's original 1996 Classic Line collection, or more obvious as with, for
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According to Brigitte Eiermann her late husband, the German architect and designer Egon Eiermann, would work so long on a furniture design project until he could say "Das ist nicht besser zu machen" - "That cannot be improved". It was, so Frau Eiermann, rare that he said such, so great was his striving for perfection. Everything could, somehow, be improved.1 However we imagine Egon Eiermann would be very satisfied with the new table trestle Egon from Stuttgart based manufacturer Richard
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As we noted in our post from the 2015 Garden Unique Youngstars competition, the contemporary outdoor furniture market is a largely forgotten world as far as quality design is concerned. And as we also noted, it needn't be. At IMM Cologne 2016 Thonet are presenting with the new All Seasons collection their alternative vision. Thonet @ IMM Cologne 2016 The (hi)story of Thonet furniture is, as with the wider (hi)story of furniture design, essentially one of indoor furniture. Although not
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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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