Our views on Chemnitz are well known. Travel south of Chemnitz however and you'll come to an area of Germany that time didn't so much forget - it never even knew it existed. A bit like Bhutan, the Erzgebirge is an autonomous, inaccessible mountain region where the dearth of contact with the outside world means that popular knowledge about the area is largely dominated by myth, legend and the yellowing, travel logbooks of gentleman explorers of centuries gone. It is therefore all the more
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About a thousand years ago we asked our favourite Portuguese designerTM Rui Alves aka My Own Super Studio about the use of colour in his work and he answered "I try not be afraid of colour. Portuguese art and design has a tradition of using lots of colour and so for me it is natural to use colour." Anyone wanting to get a feel for what Rui means need only spend a day travelling on the Lisbon underground. While there are a lot of cities where using the underground system is more visually
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Shortly before the 11th Dutch Design Week kicks off in Eindhoven at the end of October, Holland's oldest auction house, Venduehuis in the Hague, will host its 1st Design Auction. Presumably the first of many. In addition to a general sale of design objects, prototypes and the like, the Venduehuis Design Auction also features a charity auction of specially created one-offs. Under the title "A Chair for Charity", thirteen leading contemporary Dutch designers have been invited to select an
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Remaining in celebratory mood..... Twenty five years after the young guns of European modernism gathered in Stuttgart to open the Weissenhof Siedlung, a "somewhat ageing" Danish architect, who as a student had been greatly influenced by the works of European modernism, was about to make his global breakthrough with a chair design which as much as any represents the post-War break with modernism and the fearless march into the new, uncertain, world. Happy 60th Birthday the Ant Chair by Arne
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On July 23rd 2012 the Weißenhofsiedlung Stuttgart celebrates its 85th "birthday". An anniversary which provides a near-perfect excuse to relive one of the most important moments in the development of European Modernism. As if we really need an excuse. Initiated by the Deutscher Werkbund in cooperation with Stuttgart City Council the Weißenhofsiedlung comprised some 63 flats in 33 buildings designed by a truly stellar collection of international architects and was just one part of a larger
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If we're honest when we initially saw Speiseschrank by Nadin Jahn at the Bauhaus University Weimar 2012 Diploma exhibition we kept on walking. It just didn't tickle us. Didn't seem that interesting or relevant. But when we approached it a second time we stopped and considered it properly. Thankfully! Back in the day fruit and vegetables were stored in cellars, garages and similar naturally cool, dark spaces. Today they are stored in heated kitchens and as most of us only go shopping once a
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Back in April we asked Pascal Berberat, Head of the Vitra Airport Division why airport seating always has armrests. And thus denies us all the chance to lie down and snooze. A flippant question we concede, but such issues of course take on a very real significance when your flight is delayed and you find yourself with an unexpected overnight stay in the airport. What ya gonna do? Currently airports have either nothing to offer, meaning passengers have to find a way to make themselves
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Among a decent if not especially vintage selection of Diploma projects on show at the Bauhaus University Weimar Summaery 2012 exhibition, the one that was getting the least attention when we were there was also, in our opinion, the best. Schwarz auf Weiss by Jenni-Fee Hahn. Modern communication is all well and good. It's quick, it's easy, it's universal. But we all know it is also, as Blur so very nearly put it. Rubbish. It doesn't satisfy us. It doesn't motivate us. It doesn't inspire us.
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When we mentioned it last year it was just intended as a cheap pun. But slowly we can see a lot of sense in changing the name of the annual end of year exhibition at the Bauhaus University Weimar to Autumnery. For as with Summaery 2011, Summaery 2012 wasn't. And although we had the feeling that this years show was less extensive than last years, we still found plenty to distract us from the unseasonal weather. Among the highlights for us were the results of the classes "Falter" which
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One of the objects that has been following us around the international designer furniture circus this past year or so has been Flatmate by Michael Hilgers. The idea is very simple. Much like the chair project "The Half" by Studio Sailing to Mars, Flatmate takes the standard storage sideboard we all know - and reduces its dimensions. And in doing so creates a very familiar object in an equally unfamiliar scale. Unlike "The Half" the reduction is not geared towards ergonomic efficiency but
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As we always say one of the joys of visiting design festivals is the chance they offer to explore different parts of the host city. Normally it is the visitors who travel. In Leipzig, it's Designers' Open that travels. The true minstrel under the European design festivals, Designers' Open has been annually packing its kit bag and moving on ever since leaving its, figurative, family home in the Grassi Museum in 2006. Designers Open 2012 will be held from October 25th to 28th in the
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Green Lamp by Zuzanna Malinowska is essentially a plant pot with an integrated growing frame. Clearly intended for climbing plants, the beauty of the growing frame is that it is a lamp shade. And below the lamp shade is, naturally enough, a bulb. The plant grows, takes on the form of the growing frame and before you know it you have a lamp formed from a plant. Now we are assuming that Zuzanna has checked and the plant can't get burned by the bulb; or indeed catch fire. And if she has, then
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The history of furniture design is strewn with works that briefly graced the public stage before vanishing without the honour of a curtain call. Crawl through the cellar of any major furniture producer and you'll find them; the perfectly mummified remains of genuine design classics that failed to transform their creative majesty into hard cash. Such as the so-called "Girard Group" by Alexander Girard. Although best known for his textile and wallpaper designs Alexander Girard wasn't averse to
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Post-DMY commitments in Berlin sadly meant that we couldn't attend the "Confrontations – Contemporary Dutch Design Live" event at the Vitra Design Museum. Fortunately the Vitra Design Museum and their partner, the Dutch design platform Premsela, have released videos of the five projects, through which of course one also gets a feel for the sixth project - the exhibition design by catalogtree. Shot by the experienced hands at designguide.tv the films offer a wonderful insight into the
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There is a 1961 poster by the Stuttgart designer Hanns Lohrer for Porsche which depicts a Porsche 356B framed by pair of skis and a fur hat. The image cries out Sean Connery era James Bond. Refined, exclusive, self-confident, a little bit cheeky .... and highly desirable. Together with the other works in the "The Perfect Sporting Partner" series the poster is a delightful testament to Lohrer's ability to produce work that perfectly matched the client's brief without compromising himself
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Older readers will remember our post from the opening of the exhibition “Zoom. Italian Design and the Photography of Aldo and Marirosa Ballo” at the Vitra Design Museum back in April 2011. As an exhibition "Zoom" explores the birth of the Italian furniture design myth/legend - a myth/legend established, propagated, and maintained by photos as expressive as they are timeless. In that post we compared the creation of designer furniture legends with the creation of music legends using the example
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One of the defining images of DMY Berlin 2012 was without question Andrea Brena sitting cross-legged on his stand, up to his elbows in brightly coloured material and knitting with his arms. A sight that, as one can imagine, always attracted a crowd as numerous as it was curious. Although outwardly about knitting with your arms, the central theme of Knitted Army is much more about redefining the personal connection between user and object. About reclaiming furniture from the cold, dark cave
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July is famously the month we escape the tight constraints of the professional design circus and head out to annoy design students at their annual end of year shows. Only to come back not only in awe at the quality of some of the works we have seen; but confident in the bright future of the German design community. Whereas our tour traditionally keeps us safely within the confines of the former DDR - this year we're including Stuttgart. Design? Stuttgart? We know. Stuttgart! But lest we
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We were famously first drawn to the work of Belgian designer Tim Baute aka Interror.be via a lamp he showed at Designers Fair Cologne 2010. And his SevenUp, a moody and reduced down chandelier, remains one of our reference products. Tim is however a metalworker by training and so it was good to see him presenting a new steel product range for his debut at DMY Berlin. And although named after the B-2 Bomber, the range doesn't have its origins in the secretive world of military aviation, but
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It's fair to say that until visiting DMY Berlin 2012 the only design object we knew from Rosenheim was Nils Holger Moormann's Volvo. However at Tempelhof Airport the students from the Interior Design department of the Hochschule Rosenheim demonstrated that the southern German town can also produce slightly more contemporary works. On an interesting and nicely varied DMY stand the two highlights for us were the table "T#9" by Rebecca Schmidhuber and the kitchen system "Stangenware" by Nina
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We're obviously not going to claim that dezeen track what we're up to, however.... Hot the heels of our brief, succinct, exploration of the current state of the British design industry, dezeen - the leading UK based design and architecture portal - have teamed up with Hackney Council and curator/critic Beatrice Galilee to organise a day dedicated to design from the London Borough of Hackney. A chance, if you like, to get a feel not only for what is currently happening in the London design
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Until October 31st 2012 Bauhaus Dessau is showing the exhibition "Marcel Breuer – Design and Architecture" Presenting a wide-ranging look at Breuer's furniture and architectural legacy "Marcel Breuer – Design and Architecture" is a product of the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein and is curated by the journalist/curator/lecturer Mathias Remmele. At the exhibition opening we caught up with Mathias Remmele for a quick chat about Marcel Breuer, his work and his influences. (smow)blog: From the
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When all's said and done Marcel Breuer's 1927 Wassily Chair is nothing more than a couple of bits of material stretched over a metal frame. Giandomenico Belotti's 1960 Spaghetti Chair is nothing more than some PVC cord stretched over a metal frame And so on first impressions there is nothing new about "Upholstered Chair" by Jooyeon Lee. Damn those first impressions............... Created as her Diploma project at the Aalto University Helsinki, "Upholstered Chair" is a lounger created from
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Older readers will remember our fascination and admiration for Scolyt by Marco Merkel after we saw it at the UdK Berlin Rundgang 2011. Marco has now developed things a little further, reduced the scale and is presenting the project at DMY Berlin 2012. We're still lovin' it. And not just because of the beauty of the end results. But because of the thinking and process behind the project. We're fairly certain there is absolutely no useful application of the process, other than creating such
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