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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Room for Change by Design Campus/d-o-t-s, Vienna Design Week 2023 As noted from the exhibtion Plant Fever. Towards a Phyto-centred design at Schloss Pillnitz, Dresden, a component of its tenure in Dresden was its integration into the 2023 Design Campus Summer School, a platform of the Kunstgewerbemuseum Dresden, a platform under the direction in 2023 of Studio d-o-t-s a.k.a. Laura Drouet and Olivier Lacrouts, curators of Plant Fever; and in which context the Summer School participants
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While the Art Nouveau of the late 19th/early 20th centuries was without question inspired and informed by nature, for all by plants, one thinks, for example of the many representations of alliums, liliums, vitaceae et al, it was a moment that was led by humans, and for all one that placed human needs, human demands, human comforts at its core. Certainly above the needs, demands, comforts of plants. With the exhibition Plant Fever. Towards a phyto-centred design Schloss Pillnitz, Dresden, or
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"It is a very interesting thing indeed to ask myself certain questions", reflected H.G. Wells in 1937, "How did I come to know what I know about the world and myself? What ought I to know? What would I like to know that I don't know? If I want to know about this or that, where can I get the clearest, best and latest information? And where did these other people about me get their ideas about things? Which are sometimes so different from mine. Why do we differ so widely?"1 Questions whose
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It is highly unlikely any 18th century banquet in Dresden's Schloss Pillnitz would have been graced by a cake that came close to matching the Baroque grandeur of the location, certainly no cake that would have had a richness, plenitude or vitality to match; cake as it existed in the 1700s being a much flatter, breadier, monotone, delight, one which we today would barely recognise as cake, but which then was understood as cake, the whole cake and nothing but cake. Then additions were made to
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In 1968 the East German designer Rudolf Horn opined that "the changed tenor of industrial production in the socialist society, in relation to its task of satisfying cultural needs on a mass scale, raises the question of how despite mass production the consumer can realise an individual [domestic] environment, and in addition forces us to consider the problem of how the cultured personality can creatively contribute to the design of their immediate surroundings."1 How indeed....? It was,
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According to our old friend Roget possible synonyms for "August" include great, noble, impressive or worshipful. We can't promise the following quintet of exhibitions will exactly meet such qualities; however, they promise to be anything but frivolous, undignified or flighty explorations of their subject, and therefore certainly should be tending to the August in August 2019....... "New rollout. bauhaus wallpaper" at the Kulturgeschichtlichen Museum Osnabrück, Germany Although Bauhaus,
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"Low bowls with flowers, as well as flowers placed on the tablecloth and a platter of fruit, are the most beautiful table decorations. All table centrepieces with rocks, palm trees, ostriches, deer, and such are ludicrous, for these things have no business on a table, and all tall table decorations - even those made of flowers - are also unsuitable since they screen the dinner guests from one another", opined Ellen Key of table culture in her 1899 essay Beauty in the Home.1 But that was then.
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