"The May of life blooms but once", reflects Friedrich Schiller, continuing, "It has faded for me".1 Cheer up Freddie!!! And there's nothing quite like a good architecture or design exhibition to revitalise all your faculties. Our recommended fertilizers for the zest of life in May 2022 can be found in Berlin, Den Haag, Brussels, Pfäffikon SZ and Amsterdam....... "Organizing Things" at the Werkbundarchiv - Museum der Dinge, Berlin, Germany According to Rudolf Clausius's interpretation of
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Jongerius A Hella; A Lab; An Open-ended exploration As the ancient scribe Oranje Tulpenbol of Old Amsterdam records in his letters to the Rotter Dam aan Maas, the contemporary Jongerius is largely a consequence of the contributions of a Jongerian universally known as Hella on account of the brightness and lucidity of her Jongerius, a luminescence and clarity which was key in enabling Jongerius rise from its native home amongst the peoples of the Netherlands and to disseminate freely across
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"The problem", elucidated Herman Hertzberger in 1973, in context of his project for the Centraal Beheer insurance company in Apeldoorn, The Netherlands, "was to make an office building that would be a working place where everybody would feel at home: a house for 1000 people."1 How Herman Hertzberger sought to solve that problem not only helping explain aspects of the development of architecture in the course of the 20th century, nor only aspects of the development of office design in the
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"The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler", confided the American author, ecologist and conservationist Aldo Leopold in his 1949 book "A Sand County Almanac", "The flash of his gold-and-blue plumage amid the dank decay of the June woods is in itself proof that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa." The following five new design and architecture exhibitions are our prothonotary warblers: proving as they, hopefully, do that abstract ideas
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As we noted in our original post on Niek Wagemans' nachBAR project for the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, we sadly had to depart Berlin before construction was finished. "What we’ve seen so far however impresses.", we noted, "And we can’t imagine our position will change dramatically." It hasn't. A delightfully compact, well proportioned and very welcoming object, nachBAR proudly presents it origins and with its sheet steel cladding and rounded edges radiates something of the aura, and arguably
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With their high walls, locked gates, uncooperative guards and more video cameras than your average broadcasting company need to cover a simple football tournament in South America, embassies aren't, generally speaking, the most welcoming of places. A small piece of another culture they may be, but never a piece of another culture that appears particularly interested in interacting with the neighbours. To demonstrate that alternatives are possible, that embassies can be a focal point in a
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It's not all hard work you know. Just read a nice little article on dutch design portal design.nl in which Marie-Luce Bree, deputy director of the Foam Photography Museum in Amsterdam, talks about their photo project “New Greetings From”; which basically follows the tried and tested method of getting members of the public to submit photos and then using the best to create an exhibition. In detail, “New Greetings From” requests contributors to submit photos showing their interpretation of
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