Dreamer's Garden by Linda Procházka and Jive Lau, as seen at Designblok Prague 2024 For all that gardens, be they small private gardens or expansive public gardens are often considered as refuges of nature, as small islands of nature amid the brutality of modern society, all gardens are artificial constructions. Even the Garden of Eden was, if one so will, an artificial construction. Gardens exist as extensions of the human imagination, creativity, desires, ideals. They aren't natural.
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Born in Coburg, Franken, in 1961 Cornelius Réer took his first steps in the world of glass via an apprenticeship at Glashütte Süßmuth, Immenhausen, near Kassel, followed by periods working in Austria and Sweden and a nine month course at Brierley Hill Glass Center in Dudley, England, before returning to Franken and establishing his own studio in Fürth in 1992. If a return to Franken punctuated by long absences: the next 11 years seeing Cornelius lead an, essentially, nomadic life, travelling
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Let's be honest, it wouldn't be smow if it followed the rules and did that which you'd expected it to. Thus it should have come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that the inaugural Grassimesse smow-Designpreis produced not the expected one, but two, joint, co-winners: Budapest based designer Annabella Hevesi and her studio Line and Round I O and Nürnberg based glassmaker Cornelius Réer....... smow co-founder Martina Stadler reads the laudatio for Cornelius Réer (m) Annabella Hevesi / Line
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As noted in our (brief) introductory post from Stockholm 2023, alongside all the problematic aspects of furniture fairs, one of the advantages, one of the joys of the format, is the chance to catch up with folks, the opportunity they offer to meet with, if oft all too briefly, individuals whose paths you don't cross on a regular basis; individuals such as Budapest based András Kerékgyártó, a designer who we greatly enjoy talking to, or more accurately who we greatly enjoy listening too,
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There is an argument to be made that the craft of the glassmaker is as anachronistic in the 21st century as that of the candlemaker: an argument that while the later has seen their craft superseded by the electric lightbulb, the function of the former has not only been increasingly marginalised by the rise of industrially produced glassware, but also by the development of new materials, materials more robust and more durable than the famously fragile and transient glass. The candlemaker and
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For popularly understood reasons not only did the 2021 edition of the IMM Cologne furniture trade fair not take place as planned in mid-January, neither did the 2021 edition of Cologne's Passagen Interior Design Week..... ....which doesn't mean that fresh contemporary design wasn't to be found in Cologne in mid-January. In an offline realised and online presented exhibition the assemblage Generation Köln introduced the results of their collaborations with the CIAV Meisenthal glassworks; a
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The first metaphors may, or may not, have been animal based, but materials are just as adaptable. And few are as adaptable as glass. The Glass Ceiling as the impenetrable, yet invisible boundary. The Heart of Glass as a state of extreme emotional weakness. While in most glass metaphors the focus is an inherent property of glass: transparency. With the exhibition Welt aus Glas. Transparentes Design the Wilhelm Wagenfeld Haus Bremen abstract that metaphor to explore the link between
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