Wegneritis An Itch; A Compulsion; A Just One Good Chair Formally catalogued in the WHO International Classification of Diseases as MB23.W1, Wegneritis is a condition exclusive to furniture designers first recorded in Denmark where Jørgensen Wegner, a Hans by birth, and a leading carpenter of his age whose chairs were celebrated and acclaimed throughout all the known lands of that period, was beset by a compulsion, a creative itch, to design ever new chairs, "If only you could design just one
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As Sara Coleridge so very, very, nearly phrased it: "Hot July brings cooling showers, Apricots, and inspiring days in architecture and design museums"1 Our five apricots recommendations for inspiring new exhibitions opening in the, invariably, far, far, too hot July of 2024 take us all to Luxembourg, Remagen, Warsaw, Utrecht and Susch....... "Xanti Schawinsky: Play, Life, Illusion — a Retrospective" at Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Mudam, Luxembourg Xanti Schawinsky is not only a
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Ciao Salone! Servus Salone!! Amongst the European designer furniture publishers Nils Holger Moormann has long stood out from the crowd, and that primarily because Nils Holger Moormann has never sought the crowd, has always done Nils Holger Moormann's thing, not the crowd's thing, and who in doing such has very much, and very justifiably, attracted a crowd lot of individuals. Thus while other furniture publishers dance to the tune of the international trade fair crowd, Nils Holger Moormann
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Moa by Roberta Wende, as seen at Design Without Borders 2024, Budapest As the chair Moa by Roberta Wende appeared in our field of view at Design Without Borders 2024 in the Kiscell Museum, Budapest, our first thought was "felt". Or more accurately our first thought was "FELT!!!", a reflection of our current obsession with all things wool and the promise (we firmly believe to be) inherent in an increase in small-scale, local, sheep-holding in Europe. And we were right it is felt. But not
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"There is terror and panic in our city", wrote the, then, 14 year old Clara Schwarz of life in, then, Żółkiew, Poland, today, Zhovkva, Ukraine, in the summer of 1942 of life under German occupation, "the Jews are building bunkers of all kinds: underground, double walls, anywhere they can find a spot to hide".1 For Clara and her family that "spot" was a "3 metres square and a meter and a half deep" bunker under a house, a bunker dug out by Clara and other children with their bare hands; a
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Pouls by Daniel Melente, as seen at Design Without Borders 2024, Budapest As discussed and explored in the exhibition Deep-seated. The Secret Art of Upholstery at the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig, the cushioning that is so central, so defining, in contemporary seating, and in contemporary interiors, has a long (hi)story, a long (hi)story related to technical and cultural changes, a long (hi)story which has both been informed by and has contributed to changes in society. And a
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Sonic Flowers and String by George Koutsouris, as seen at Design Without Borders 2024, Budapest In 2023 a, if one so will, special edition of Design Without Borders was held at FUGA - Budapest Center of Architecture, which devoted itself to "sound objects", objects that deliberately emit sounds, can be made to emit sounds, but which aren't musical instruments, or at least not in the normally understood definitions of the term; sound objects that, in many regards, are also part of that
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Access by mischer'traxler, as seen at Design Without Borders 2024, Budapest mischer'traxler a.k.a. Vienna based creatives Katharina Mischer and Thomas Traxler have, inarguably, been one of the more interesting and instructive design studios of the past decade and half. And that without ever achieving, without ever giving the impression of wanting to achieve, a wide public profile or a popular commercial acclaim. Always seem to have been perfectly happy getting on with doing their thing.
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Celebrating its 20th anniversary edition in 2024 we charted, and discussed, the (hi)story of Design Without Borders in our conversation with the institutions initiators, organisers and curators Szilvia Szigeti and Tamás Radnóti, and so refer you there dear readers for the background. And also refer you to our post from the 2014 edition, the last time we visited Design Without Borders in its native Budapest; a last visit in Budapest not for lack on interest, far from it, but simply on account of
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The Room for Focussed Activity, as seen at The Biophilic Workspace, Technische Universität München, Munich Creative Business Week 2024 For all that the office is popularly considered an 'environment', over a great man decades it was essentially a monoculture in terms of flora and fauna: humans were there, but little else. Save that half-dried out Yucca sp. or Philodendron sp. in the shadiest corner of the office. Or sat on the sunniest window still. Objects that have not only accompanied the
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June sees the start, in the northern hemisphere, of both meteorological summer and astronomical summer Yet for all that the arrival of summer invariably means an increasing living of life out-of-doors, and an increasing reluctance to concern oneself with overly cerebral activities, there are after all beaches to be lain on, alpine passes to be explored, and phenomenally lightweight pop novels to be read, it is important to not only take regular breaks from the sun, but also to ensure that you
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From the Bauhaus Museum Weimar you can see the Buchenwald concentration camp; from the Bauhaus Museum Weimar you can exactly locate the violence and inhumanity of the NSDAP. However from Bauhaus Weimar and Bauhaus Dessau and Bauhaus Berlin locating the NSDAP is a lot less straightforward; from the Bauhauses seeing the NSDAP is not as simple, the view towards the NSDAP being as it is partially hidden, lightly distorted, unfocussed, by the mists of an unquestioned post-War narrative. And that
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In 1949 Edgar Kaufmann Jr. the, then, Director of the Industrial Design Department at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, reflected, not uncritically, that "as more and more new chairs become available to the buying public, the problem of selection begins to be bewildering." A truism that has lost nothing in contemporaneousness over the decades; and also a very nice eyewitness observation from the early days of the rise of the post 1939-45 War American furniture design industry. And of its
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Wellen, Wogen, Wirbel. Water as a source of inspiration, Galerie Handwerk, Munich Water, as we all know, is that compound without which life on earth simply wouldn't be physically possible. And a compound that, as discussed from, for example, Water Pressure. Designing for the Future at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, has an importance and relevance for human society that goes far beyond the physical of its life giving properties. Important and relevant as the physical of its life
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Earth Centered Design. An Exhibition, Hochschule München, Munich Creative Business Week 2024 In context of Tsuyoshi Tane's Garden House project on the Vitra Campus, long-year Vitra CEO Rolf Fehlbaum opined that in the immediate post 1939-45 War decades "the industrial idea of taking over nature without caring was very typical". And arguably not just then. As discussed in context of, for example, At the coalface! Design in a post-carbon age at the Centre for Innovation and Design at
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Established in 2012, so a good three and half years after smow Blog, just sayin', Munich Creative Business Week, MCBW, is today, according to its own claim, "Germany's largest design event". A claim we see absolutely no reason to doubt, but also haven't tried to verify. Primarily because we see so little reason to doubt it. Despite our famed cynicism. Initiated by bayern design, Bavaria's "international design competence centre", and from the very beginning known as Munich Creative Business
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Rowac at Berlin Design Week 2024 By the time the Peter-Behrens-Bau was inaugurated in 1917 Robert Wagner’s Rowac Schemel, one of the earliest seating objects crafted from lightweight sheet steel, had been on the market for almost a decade. If it was used in the workshops and offices of the Nationale Automobil-Gesellschaft, NAG, who, at that time, called the Peter-Behrens-Bau home, or by the wider AEG family to whom NAG was a member, and who so defined the industrialisation of the early 20th
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For all that steel tubing is the popular personification of the rise of the novel in furniture and interior design in context of the developing industrialisation of the first third of the 20th century, that primary representative of the rise of the machine and its victory over craft, in many regards the real symbol of the progress of the period was the novel synthetic plastics being developed, Bakelite being inarguably the best known and most widely employed. Yet while in the 1920s and 30s the
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Given that 'design' is popularly associated with a limitless reality, an unrestrainable questioning, a pushing at the open doors of possibility, it does tend to get hemmed in quite a lot, we do tend to like place it within an awful lot of borders: geographic borders, category borders, practice borders, conceptual borders, historic borders, etc, etc, etc. Or at least most of us do. For the past 20 years Budapest has been home to a borderless design, to Design Without Borders, an institution
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Morari by Jesse Altmann, Valentina Lenk and Klara Schneider, as seen at Berlin Design Week 2024 If we're going to entice and encourage ever more individuals in urban spaces to give up their private cars, and, we'll argue, that is desirable not only in terms of tackling the myriad problems of our contemporary urban spaces but also in exposing the fiction of, and the egoistic stupidity of, autonomous cars and flying taxis, we not only need public transport vehicles and networks that are
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Dedas by Annabella Hevesi, as seen at Berlin Design Week 2024 Admittedly the Dedas sofa by Budapest based designer Annabella Hevesi isn't part of Berlin Design Week 2024. But it is on show at Berlin Design Week 2024. Is part of the installation of the Sphere wallpaper collection for Italian manufacturer Tecnografica by Berlin based, Hungarian born, media artist Dávid Szauder in cooperation with Budapest based interior design studio Freeform a.k.a. Eszter Bolgár and Tímea Csitári. Albeit
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Next: Young European Design, Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin, Berlin Design Week 2024 Curated by Alexandra Klatt, initiator and driving force behind Berlin Design Week, and staged in cooperation with the European Union National Institutes for Culture, EUNIC, Berlin and the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin, the latter also hosting the showcase, the 'Next' of Next: Young European Design isn't to be understood as the 'next generation of designers', or not solely it is also about that, but primarily is to be
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Over the years of these dispatches design weeks in Berlin, in a wider sense design and designers in Berlin, have played a very important role, as can be gauged from the tag cloud in the footer: Berlin is one of our most regularly used tags, and DMY Berlin occurs more often than a great many designers, manufacturers, fairs and other festivals. A DMY Berlin that back in the day we used to essentially live in; like some awkward, artless, commensalistic symbiont we would spend days on end drifting
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As all around, certainly all around here in Europe, the world blossoms and blooms into life, as colour and variety and vitality abound, it's strange to remember that just a few short weeks ago everything was so barren, monochrome, desolate. Not least in context of the global architecture and design museum community: how hard we had to labour to achieve anything approaching what could justifiably be termed a 'list' of new architecture and design exhibitions. Similarly it's hard to imagine that
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