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,
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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
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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
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When in 2013 the design facilitators from Depot Basel were forced to move from their original home in a former grain silo to their current home in a former bureau de change they not only gave up a venue which we once, and not entirely positively, declared as the "picture perfect location for a contemporary design gallery", they also gave up some 90% of their space: 800 sqm becoming just 65. What they however gained was display windows. Lots of display windows. And the question of how best to
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As we recently noted, summer is slowly giving way to autumn and with it the realisation that long sunny days lounging in gardens or on poolsides will slowly give way to long sunless days in office chairs. Autumn 2014 also means for us Orgatec, Europe's largest office furniture trade fair, and an invariable flood of "new" office chair "designs." Consequently, it should come as no surprise that we recently took our copy of Jonathan Olivares' A Taxonomy of Office Chairs from the (smow) bookshelf.
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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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There is an old adage about turning problems into chances, of every cloud having a silver lining, of every thorn having its rose. One of the best examples of such is the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein. In the wake of a 1981 fire at the Weil am Rhein production site, Vitra found themselves needing to quickly rebuild. And needing a fire station. The first problem was solved by Nicholas Grimshaw with his Production Hall. The second by Zaha Hadid with her Fire Station. In the intervening 30+
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