Category: smow bookcase

Monobloc by Hauke Wendler

With furniture, as with so much in life, it is rarely the showy, high profile, works, or individuals, that teach us most, but those works, and those individuals, who in their anonymity and modesty accompany us in invisible silence.

Or rather the anonymous and quiet could teach us most, if we spent less time being distracted by, letting ourselves willingly be distracted by, the noise of the showy.

With the project Monobloc author and director Hauke Wendler, and a team of co-collaborators, offer us all an opportunity to focus on, and learn from, an object we’ve all seen and used, but only rarely, if ever, openly engaged with…….

karl clauss dietel. die offene form by Walter Scheiffele and Steffen Schuhmann

It is perhaps indicative of the differing receptions to and estimations of design in the former West Germany and the former East Germany that while Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles of good design are revered as if cast in stone, Karl Clauss Dietel’s Five Big Ls of good design have barely seen the light of day since November 1989.

A popular focus on the former West which tends to popular understandings of design from West Germany as being valid and authentic and laudable, while design from East Germany is reduced, denigrated, to cartoon Ostalgie.

With karl clauss dietel. die offene form Walter Scheiffele and Steffen Schuhmann allow one to approach more probable understandings both of the (hi)story of design in the former East Germany and of Karl Clauss Dietel’s position in the (hi)story of design, and in doing so stimulate a re-evaluation of the receptions to and estimations of design in and from East Germany…….

TASCHEN Verlag presents Gio Ponti: A coffee table book that comes with its own coffee table

In 1935 George Nelson opined that “the history of art in Italy presents the astonishing spectacle of a series of men who knew no boundaries between the arts”; a history, a tradition, Nelson saw continued into 1930s Italy through “the cheering example of Gio Ponti, who found early in life that no one profession was sufficient to use up his energy or exhaust his interests, and added others with the nonchalance of a small boy increasing his collection of marbles”.¹

A borderless, inexhaustible collection of marbles explored and discussed in the new Gio Ponti monograph from TASCHEN Verlag……

smow bookcase: Depot Basel – Display

When in 2013 the design facilitators from Depot Basel were forced to move from their original home in a former

(smow) bookcase: A Taxonomy of Office Chairs by Jonathan Olivares

As we recently noted, summer is slowly giving way to autumn and with it the realisation that long sunny days

(smow) blog Design Calendar: April 2nd 1914 – Happy Birthday Hans J. Wegner!

Born on April 2nd 1914 Hans Jørgensen Wegner is without question one of the most important designers of the so-called

(smow) reading: The Vitra Campus – Architecture Design Industry

There is an old adage about turning problems into chances, of every cloud having a silver lining, of every thorn