Belgium is uncharted territory for us. Not literately, we're in Belgium fairly frequently. Indeed so frequently that we are often asked why we don't move to Belgium. Because we've been to Belgium, we reply (JOKE!!)) But Belgium is uncharted territory in terms of our annual #campustour: the design school summer showcases in Belgium tending as they do to run parallel to those in London, and that in previous years we've had good reason to be in London at that time, we've, logically, not been in
read more
It's almost impossible to reflect on design education without reflecting on Bauhaus. Especially this year. And especially when a tour of design school summer exhibitions takes you to Sachsen-Anhalt and Thüringen, to those (contemporary) German States where for 100 years Bauhaus both began and found its de facto end. And while there will be time in coming posts for those reflections on the Gropius school and the developments of the century past, the focus of our 2019 #campustour visits to
read more
With its abundance of forests, earths, coals and waterways the contemporary Nordrhein-Westfalen has long been an important centre of production, industry, trade and by extrapolation design and creativity; at various stages in history important impulses and innovation radiating from communities such as Aachen, Hagen, Krefeld, Essen, Soest or Düsseldorf....... .........and since the end of the 19th century from the myriad of art, applied art, architecture and design schools dotted throughout the
read more
Small as the Netherlands may be in the global jigsaw, it has been the source of numerous significant impulses in terms of architecture and design, numerous significant impulses which for reasons of brevity we'll reduce to the Dutch gable as a defining feature of baroque architecture, to De Stijl as leading protagonists of the early 20th century European avant-garde, and to that late 20th century Dutch avant-garde that developed in the course of the 1990s and which did so much to force an
read more
If the recent history of Germany is one of East and West, the longer history is one of North and South; a history which, and simplifying to the point of falsehood, saw the rivalry and conflict between the Hanseatic League and the traders of the southern states become a rivalry and conflict between Prussia and the realms of Baden, Württemberg, Hessen and Bavaria: the latter being the most reluctant to ratify the 1870 November Treaties and join the new Deutsches Reich. A reluctance expressed not
read more
Partly for reasons of its size, and partly on account of the way the then nations of the contemporary Germany responded to the challenges and realities of late 19th/early 20th century industrialisation, Germany is home to a truly outrageous number of architecture and design schools, certainly more than it would be logical, prudent or congenial to pack into one post. And so to save your nerves, and our fingers, we'll present the German leg of our 2019 #campustour via a series of regional
read more
For Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince Summertime may very well be a "Time to sit back and unwind", for us Summertime is when our year finally, finally, gets going. While others spend the long hot days of summer on the beach, in the mountains, riding around in their Jeep, their Benzos, Nissan or eating pizza at Lorenzos, we're to be found either riding backwards in trains, our eyes fixed firmly on the past as we race into the future, terrified that a metaphor is becoming an omen, or wandering the
read more
Designer, grib magten! enjoined the 2018 Design School Kolding exhibition, Designer, seize the power! Which not only sounds a bit more revolutionary than one is use to from Danes, but also implies designers should be in power. A position on which, and as we oft noted, we're highly sceptical. Intimately involved in power systems yes, but designers in charge....... Consequently we thought it wise to set course for the Design School Kolding 2018 Graduation Exhibition. Designer, grib magten!
read more
Atop bonny Killesberg, and beside Kochenhof, (the) Akademie der Bildenden Künste, ABK, Stuttgart has been nurturing a basic kernel within a bright kettle of students of numerous creative disciplines since 1761. For their 2018 Rundgang the, we believe the word is, identity, was based on alternative resolutions of the initialism ABK, the central one being Alle brauchen Kunst - Everyone Needs Art. But do we need that applied, functional art developed in the year past at the ABK Stuttgart......?
read more
As we all learned from the exhibition Peter Behrens. The Practical and the Ideal at the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum Krefeld, the city was an important location in the development of the young Peter Behrens, not least through the role played by the museum's founding director Friedrich Deneken in helping Behrens take his first steps from pure to applied arts; help which included not only giving Behrens' work space in the museum but also mediating commissions with Krefeld manufacturers. One of the more
read more
The 2018 ArtEZ Academy of Art & Design Arnhem graduation exhibition was staged under the title, Liberty, but how many would the students be taking...... ArtEZ Academy of Art & Design Arnhem, Liberty 2018 ArtEZ Arnhem Formally established in 2002 through the fusion of existing creative colleges in Arnhem, Enschede and Zwolle, ArtEZ not only still maintains colleges in the three locations, but unites the three, and the word Art, in the name ArtEZ; not particularly elegantly, but effectively.
read more
As we regularly note in our #campustour posts, what students produce is largely irrelevant, alone important in how the student got there, including how they responded to a given brief, posed their initial question, the logic in the decisions they made, the lessons learned from their mistakes, the lessons learned from others, the impulses received from contemporary discourses, etc, and how through the course of all such their understanding of and relationship to design evolved...... The Münster
read more
We doubt we will be able to visit the 2019 Summaery exhibition at Bauhaus University Weimar, as we suspect the town will be too full of visitors celebrating the centenary of Bauhaus Weimar. Or perhaps better put, full of confused visitors wondering where all the steel tube furniture is..... Wrong Bauhaus people. Consequently we attempted to extract as much as we could from Summaery 2018. Bauhaus University Weimar @ Summaery 2018 Bauhaus University Weimar Summaery 2018 Although the
read more
Having made his way to America as a stowaway on an British freighter the Dutch abstract expressionist artist, and eponym of Rotterdam's art school, Willem de Kooning, initially made his living as a painter and decorator. Which, considered in context of his later work, is just the most delicious thought...... "No Willem, that wall ONLY green, that wall ONLY yellow, the doors ONLY white. And straight edges!!!" Willem de Kooning Academy & Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam Willem de Kooning
read more
That unfamiliar bouquet in the air in Karlsruhe is the wind of change blowing through the Hochschule für Gestaltung: having guided, nurtured and, one assumes, wisely counselled, the design department since 1994 as Professor for Product Design Volker Albus is departing. What that all means for the future is anyone's guess, it's very much a case of watch this space; for now all we could do is to what we do whenever a wind of change blows, and follow the Moskva down to Gorky Park and then on to
read more
Derived from the French parcourir, the parcours is perhaps historically most popularly associated with equine show-jumping, the challenge of negotiating an artificial obstacle course; more recently it has become popular in context of human show-jumping, the challenge of negotiating an urban obstacle course. Approaching the Köln International School of Design 2018 KISDparcours semester and graduation exhibition we hoped the obstacles to be negotiated would be of the mental, philosophical,
read more
If, as we all freely accept, the meaning of life is 42, what does that make 43? A miscalculation, and a life led in the belief that it was correct, all for the best, but was in actual fact all very wrong and completely missing the point? A self-deluding over-estimation of the value of one's own contribution to society? Biting off more than you can chew? Superfluous? Such, and other, considerations have kept us busy since the the 2018 smow blog #campustour formally ended....... A falafel.
read more
Counting amongst its alumni the likes of Finn Juhl, Arne Jacobsen, Nanna Ditzel, Kaare Klint, Georg Jensen, do stop us if we get boring, Verner Panton, Thorvald Bindesbøll, Ole Wanscher, Poul Kjærholm, and pretty much any other Danish designer or architect of whom you've ever heard, and a great many more of whom you haven't, the Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi Copenhagen was formally inaugurated on March 31st 1754 in honour of the 31st birthday of Frederik V. But is it a gift that keeps on
read more
Odd as it may be to consider today, in the course of the 19th century and throughout the first decades of the 20th century, the German town of Chemnitz was one of the most important locations in central Europe for heavy and mechanical engineering, and thereby an important motor on the highway from craft to industrial production, supplying as it did the machines, infrastructure and ideas to enable that transfer. The importance of Chemnitz in the 19th century can perhaps be best gauged by the
read more
We've spent so much time walking alongside canals on this #campustour we've started to feel less like dashing thoroughbreds and more like plodding, monotonous, if honest, loyal and sedulous barge ponies. There are, as far as we are aware, no canals in Aachen, yet, and much like those city's who owe their existence to canals, Aachen owes its existence, and name, to its waters: the thermal springs arising in the city meaning that since Roman times the peoples of the region, and from further
read more
Approaching the 2018 Universität der Künste Berlin Rundgang one was obliged to navigate the weekly antique and flea market that overwhelms the Straße des 17. Juni, and thereby walk, hurry, past untold objects whose ill consideration, self-celebration, kitschiness or plain ugliness confuse, insult, anger and otherwise offend the senses and sensibilities. An inconvenience, or an omen for that which awaited us..........? Universität der Künste Berlin, Germany Universität der Künste Berlin With
read more
"It is a peculiar tension that precedes a first visit to a painting exhibition", opined the Dutch art critic Jacques van Santen Kolff in the introduction to his four part review of the 1875 exhibition at the Teeken-Akademie Den Haag, "there is a unique charm, something stimulating in that nervousness, an eminently "picturesque" tension."1 Kolff wasn't disappointed, that which he had sensed in the air was confirmed by that which hung on the walls and led him to coin the term "Hague School",
read more
Our visit to the 2017 Royal College of Art London Graduate Show was one of the more sobering moments of our 2017 #campustour. Or as we wrote then, "...in a world controlled by RCA graduates every, but every, aspect of our lives will be controlled by autonomous smart technology. We will literally lose the ability to think for ourselves. The human brain will become the appendix of the 21st century." Donning a hat fashioned from aluminium foil and an old metal sieve, we headed once more to South
read more
"Welcher Fehler braucht ein system?", "Which errors/mistakes/imperfections does a system require?", asked the Kunsthochschule Burg Giebichenstein Halle's 2018 annual exhibition. And used the question as a celebration of the power of trial and error, of the value, importance, poetry, of imperfections, abrasion, the incorrect, the unintended, the random, the well planned but ultimately unsuccessful, and how any otherwise well-organised, professional and targeted system needs a nuisance factor,
read more
