Designblok Prague 2024 Compact: How many house plants are enough house plants? by Kateřina Husáková How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? How many roads must a man walk down Before you call him a man? How many Influencers does it take to change a lightbulb? How many house plants are enough house plants? Are there answers? Can there be answers? Must there be answers? No, no and no, But that's not the point. The point is the theorising, the posing of an abstract question,
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The Paradox of Isoëtes. Future of Almost Lost Species by Adam Kvaček, as seen at Designblok Prague 2024 Presented in context of the 2024 Designblok Diploma Selection competition, it's difficult for us to discuss Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, UMPRUM, graduate Adam Kvaček's project The Paradox of Isoëtes. Future of Almost Lost Species in all too great detail as that involves reading a thesis we've not seen. But a thesis that having seen The Paradox of Isoëtes at
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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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My Daughter's Room by Josef Tomšej, as seen at Designblok Prague 2024 (it's a video wall in the background, loved the concept, didn't make photographing it any easier. But still loved the concept) There is a much posed question in terms of chairs as to if we need ever more chairs. The answer is, we do. We certainly do; but, and as opined from A Chair and You at the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig, we all do. Similarly, at each and every design week or furniture fair we invariably
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Two Hundred Tons, as seen at Designblok Prague 2024 It's more or less a century since the first steel tube furniture was developed, and looking around you it's relatively easy to believe that since then everything has been done, that steel tube furniture has reached its full potential. Or perhaps more accurately; because the contemporary popular understanding of steel tube furniture is the steel tube furniture from the earliest days of steel tube furniture, and because the steel tube
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Last time we were at Designblok Prague the roof blew of the venue. Not our fault (this time); but the consequence of an enormous, monstrous in every sense of the word, hurricane that blew across central Europe, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake that meant it took us, if we recall correctly, about 15 weeks to get home. And that via one of the more adventurous and improbable routes we've ever travelled. On the plus side we spent so long in Prague Central Station listening to
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"The word 'document' which in the last few generations stood, and in many regards still stands for, papers relating to legal matters, such as deeds, contracts, affidavits and certificates, has in present-day professional usage reverted to its original meaning as derived from its Latin origin", opined Lucia Moholy in 1948, "and now applies to spoken, written, printed and other materials, produced and distributed for the purpose of imparting knowledge".1 With Lucia Moholy: Exposures Kunsthalle
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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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We can't remember exactly when we first came across Prague based creative collective Okolo, but certainly by the autumn of 2014 we were very much liking what they were doing: April 2014 seeing the exhibition Okolo Offline at Depot Basel and in September Okolo Offline Two – Collecting at the Kunstgewerbemuseum Dresden, both of which in their own gentle ways guided the visitor into and through the Okolo world. Keen to better understand that world we met up with Okolo co-founder Adam Štěch.....
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While figuratively "blowing the roof off" is arguably an aim of every design festival; physically having your roof blown off is not. Sadly that is what happened to Designblok Prague 2017; Storm Herwart, when not completely de-roofing the Art Deco Palace of Industry which hosted the event, causing damage sufficient to force organisers the cancel the last two days of the five day festival. A situation not only unfortunate and irksome for the organisers and exhibitors, but disappointing all
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In context of Designblok Prague 2017 the winners of the fourth edition of the pan-European design graduate competition Diploma Selection were unveiled at a ceremony in the city's Palace of Industry. Diploma Selection 2017 Winners, Nominated, Jury, Uncle Tom Cobley and all, at Designblok Prague 2017 Diploma Selection 2017 Initiated in 2014 as a joint initiative by Designblok and the European Union National Institutes for Culture, EUNIC, Diploma Selection is open to all students graduating in
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In 1960 Enzo Mari designed "16 Animali" for Italian manufacturer Danese. Comprising 16 wooden animal shapes "16 Animali" is simultaneously a child's jigsaw and 16 individual wooden toys to be played with and thrown about as wished. In 2014 with his son's second birthday approaching Prague based industrial designer Jakub Gurecký faced the question of what to give him? Yes, he could buy something, but surely as a qualified and experienced industrial designer he could also create something? But
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At Bratislava Design Week 2014 Jakub Pollág and Václav Mlynář a.k.a. Studio deFORM re-premièred their Transmission light family; "re-premièred" because although initially created in 2012 for Prague based Kavalierglass, since earlier this year the lamp family have been part of the portfolio of another Czech glass manufacturer, Lasvit. Constructed from a series of concentric glass structures which become ever more elongated as their diameter shrinks, the Transmission lamps present an
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