It seems somehow fitting that our first post from Vienna Design Week 2013 should be from a Passionswege project. Passionswege is after all one of the major attractions for us of Vienna Design Week. For anyone new, or who has mistakenly stumbled across us, Passionswege is a programme within Vienna Design Week that pairs young designers with long established handicraft based manufacturers to develop a product/project that combines the tradition of the manufacturer with the new perspective
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"My, my, my, Delilah! Why, why, why, Delilah!" The morning of Friday September 27th 2013 was one of those misty autumn occasions that cause SANAA's immense new Vitra Factory Building in Weil am Rhein to merge, almost unseen, with the grey background. Even Herzog & de Meuron's new Basel Messe complex was reduced to nothing more grand than a continuation of the uncaring monotonous sky. The glitzing, shimmering palace of high summer just the weak shadow of a memory. And so it was perhaps fitting
read moreAs we noted in our designer barbecue post "... summer is bidding its final farewells" And with autumn's impudent chill invading ever more our pastoral calm the time for our hibernation approaches. And so we're currently exploring accommodation options. Fortunately it's been a bit of a "small house year" in these pages with, for example, Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Vitra's Diogene or Jean Prouve's Maison des Jours Meilleurs occupying our thoughts. Our first contact with reduced room
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Industrial design as any fool know is a prime example of the North's cultural superiority. Nurtured by science and encouraged by wealth traditional crafts moved ever more towards industrial production to meet the ever more complex wishes of society until the creation of goods for mass production became an industry in its own right. That this is absolute tosh was made perfectly clear by Charles & Ray Eames in their 1958 "India Report" in which they describe a burgeoning industrial production
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In addition to Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen's superb modular case furniture system, a further highlight of the MoMa New York's 1940 "Organic Design in Home Furnishings" competition was Harry Weese and Benjamin Baldwin's winning collection in the "Furniture for Outdoor Living" category, a collection that included a tea wagon, table, benches, loungers and as a genuine highlight, a barbecue wagon. Resembling a coal bucket on wheels - and again owing to "issues" with the rights holder we sadly
read moreIn our post on Vitra's purchase of the Finnish furniture producer Artek we quoted from a letter George Nelson wrote to Charles Eames recounting a meeting with Alvar Aalto in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Below we quote more from said letter. We cannot prove or disprove any of the claims made therein. We assume it is all true. We say, you can keep your stories of rock star debauchery, your stories of film star excess, your stories of out of control poets and of the decadence of the European
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In 2019 the Staatlichen Bauhaus Weimar celebrates the 100th anniversary of its founding. And so, in effect, we can all celebrate 100 years of European Modernism as an important, tangible, unignorable and ever challenging movement. As part of the build-up to the anniversary the three Bauhaus locations - Berlin, Dessau, Weimar - have combined forces to instigate the Triennale der Moderne A Triennale with a triangular concept: Every three years each of the three locations will host three days
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Enter "Stuttgart architecture" into a well known search engine and you''ll get an awful lot of responses relating to the Stuttgart 21 Central Train Station redevelopment project. A situation which, in our opinion, does the city and its architecture a great disservice. For Stuttgart's architecture tradition is perhaps richer and more interesting than anywhere else in Europe. And yes we're talking about modern, 20th century architecture. What happened before the flushing toilet and
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On Saturday September 14th London Design Festival 2013 opens to the public. We'll sadly not be there. Sadly because London in early Autumn is always a delightful thought, and also because the 2013 programme would appear to contain a few real gems. As many of you know we don't like recommending shows/exhibitions/products/anything really we haven't seen ourselves. And while at such events the genuine personal highlights are often found where and when one least expects them, there are a few
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We're not going to pretend everyone is enamoured with our constant pops at Chemnitz. Truth is for the majority our behaviour lies somewhere between adolescent immaturity and the senseless ravings of an embittered pensioner. And indeed all did in fact begin when we were immature teenagers. And we've long since reach the enviable status of rancorous elder citizens. But despite being unenamoured with our demur, most have accepted and understood that it is nothing personal, that it is just an
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At Design Miami Basel 2013 one of the more impressive presentations was without question the collection of Alvar Aalto furniture shown by Stockholm/Berlin based gallery Jackson Design. A presentation that included rare examples of Alvar Aalto's furniture for and by the Finnish manufacturer Artek. And all available for purchase. Basel based furniture manufacturer Vitra have gone one step further, and have purchased Artek. Following completion of his architecture studies in 1921 Alvar Aalto
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On Saturday September 7th the winners of the International Marianne Brandt Contest 2013 were unveiled at an awards ceremony in the Industry Museum Chemnitz. We'll have more on the winners, the 2013 contest and of course the accompanying exhibition real soon, but for now the winners. Congratulations to all! Product Design Award Product & Special Award Alessi: Susanne Schwarz, "Papier tragen" Appreciation Product, Special Award (smow) & Public Award: Anna Albertine Baronius, "2tables"
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"Do the books that writers don't write matter?", asks Julian Barnes in his 1984 novel Flaubert's Parrot. In a similar vein, do the posts that bloggers don't write matter? Among Julian Barnes' arguments for not disregarding the unwritten novel is that, "Besides, an idea isn't always abandoned because it fails some quality control test. The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes
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We know what you're thinking, lost furniture designs from Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames. ??? Yup. Two of the most important, influential and best known protagonists of mid-century modern design have a product series that has vanished without trace. And in our opinion it vanished exactly because Saarinen and Eames are two of the best known protagonists of mid-century modern design. But let's start at the beginning.... In 1940 the Museum of Modern Art New York staged their "Organic Design
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Much as we bemoan our annual trip to Milan, we do generally return enriched in some form or another. And, secretly, glad that we went. 2011's epiphany came when we were introduced to the Milanese producer Azucena. The introduction coming via Konstantin Grcic and his Entre-Deux "screen/divider/barricade", an object that was/is the start of a longer term cooperation between Grcic and Azucena. A continuation of which we are patiently awaiting. Until then we are whetting our Azucena appetite
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In our post "Wilhelm Wagenfeld Reviews Design for Use, USA" we quoted Wagenfeld's assertion that "In the current age machines and handicraft are intimately interwoven with one another." The Bauhaus Archiv Berlin is currently presenting an exhibition which ably demonstrates that some 80 years later such harmonious constellations cannot only still be found, but are still producing results every bit as refined and timeless as those realised by Wilhelm Wagenfeld. Poesie & Industrie - Poetry and
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On September 3rd the Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft Cologne present the latest edition of their Ex Libris series. This time Ex Loco. In Bremen. As we noted in a previous Ex Libris post, "... much as the Internet is full of spam until you start looking for something, so to is a library just a lot of old paper until you read the books". And in this sense the Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft Cologne regularly invite architecture luminaries to select a work from the archive's
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Having already been to Chemnitz once this year we really are loathed to go a second time. It somehow feels unfair. Unjust. Twice. In one year. Why us! However on Saturday September 7th the winners of the International Marianne Brandt Contest 2013 contest will be announced and the awards exhibition formally opened. In the Industriemuseum Chemnitz. And we will be there. In the middle of June the nomination shortlist was unveiled, and even though it contains just the names of the nominated
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In our interview with the Stuttgart based designers Markus Jehs and Jürgen Laub one of the more interesting quotes is the pair's assertion that "...in Stuttgart people don’t talk so much about their success: an awful lot of creativity originates in Stuttgart but you don’t necessarily know that because no one talks about it." A quote which to be honest hasn't left us in peace since.... One organisation who do talk about creativity in Stuttgart, 20 times a year to be precise, is the Verein zur
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As any fool know contemporary product design arose from traditional crafts. The birth however wasn’t the smoothest, and the conflict between the form loving traditionalists who believed in a future of craft based industrial production and the machine fixated modernists with their focus on functionality dominated the inter-war years. Post World War II the modernists had largely succeeded in establishing their position and in his review of the 1951 exhibition “Design for Use USA” Wilhelm
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Although we rarely have reason to blow our own trumpets, we do regularly have cause to sound our colleagues veritable flourish of bugles, clarions, cornets, horns. And trumpets. Such is an occasion. With immediate effect many products in the (smow) online shop can be perused, compared and enjoyed as 360 degree photos. And they are photos. And not computer generated renderings. From established design classics including the Vitra Panton Chair or the Eames DSR over modern classics such as the
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Until September 29th the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein is presenting the exhibition Learning from Vernacular. Curated by Prof. Dr. Pierre Frey from the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Learning from Vernacular presents forty architectural models in 1:20 scale: forty architectural models which either present examples of local, traditional construction materials and principles or, and this is for us the most
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With our trademark "almost too late, but just sneaking in on time" we bring you Prima by Zaha Hadid. Conceived and realised in cooperation with the Austrian crystal concern Swarowski, Prima is a five piece installation based on Zaha Hadid's sketches for her 1993 Vitra Fire Station project. At the moment Prima is a very expensive, and very, very heavy installation on show in front of said Fire Station; however, if we know Vitra we can well imagine what the next step is... We have no formal, or
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Until August 16th the architecture gallery Wechselraum in Stuttgart is presenting the exhibition "Aus allen Richtungen. Positionen junger Architekten im BDA" Organised by the Working Group for Young Architects within the German Architects Association "Aus allen Richtungen" presents not only the views of 30 young German architects on the role of architecture in contemporary society but also reflections on their own experiences. For the exhibition each architect was given a circa A3 sized box
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