Category: Cologne Creative
Passagen Interior Design Week Cologne 2024: Dorothee Becker – aus dem persönlichen Nachlass
Passagen Interior Design Week Cologne 2024 – Alaaf!!!
Since 1990 the annual IMM Cologne furniture fair has been accompanied by the Passagen Interior Design Week. A design week, a design festival, that, and although it is often a bit overly commercial for our tastes, also always features a nice mix of emerging and establishing designers, small platforms, design schools, and others removed from the more predictable, superficial, profit-orientated corners of the furniture and design industries. A mix of creatives who help remind what design, what furniture design, is and can be. Should be. A mix of creatives not necessarily all good, that would be too much to expect, but who as a general rule are all well worth spending time with. An international mix of creatives if, more often than not, with a strong focus on Cologne, Düsseldorf and the general Rhein and Ruhr valleys. Which is in no way a complaint, it is after all their local event.
And a design week that over a great many years, along with IMM Cologne, marked the start of our year, was a permanent, unyielding, date in our calenders. Trips to the Rhein which over the years have produced innumerable abiding memories, both fondly recalled and much, much, less so. And trips to the Rhein from which we always returned wiser. Both from the positive and the negative experiences.
Then, invariably, came Covid and not only Passagen and IMM became much more complicated places to visit, but Cologne.
2024 we’re back. Or at least are back at Passagen, we’re still wrestling with the question of whether to return to large, international fairs such as IMM; still wrestling with questions of the necessity and justification and sustainability and meaningfulness of large, international fairs such as IMM. But that is no reason to ignore the design weeks that accompany them.
Thus in the coming days we will bring you some of our thoughts and reflections on some of the showcases visited in context of Passagen Interior Design Week 2024.
Thoughts and reflections on some of the design and designers encountered in the ancient, meandering, Passagen of Kölle.
Alaaf!!!
Generation Köln x CIAV Meisenthal – The Film
For popularly understood reasons not only did the 2021 edition of the IMM Cologne furniture trade fair not take place as planned in mid-January, neither did the 2021 edition of Cologne’s Passagen Interior Design Week…..
….which doesn’t mean that fresh contemporary design wasn’t to be found in Cologne in mid-January.
In an offline realised and online presented exhibition the assemblage Generation Köln introduced the results of their collaborations with the CIAV Meisenthal glassworks; a virtual exhibition, and very much hands-on project, that can now be explored via a short film……
Passagen Cologne 2020: Generation Köln trifft Bregenzerwald
In our post from the exhibition Design Gruppe Pentagon at the Museum Angewandte Kunst Cologne we noted that Gallery Pentagon was laterally based in Cologne’s Bismarckstrasse. Bismarckstrasse 50 to be precise, a former cardboard packaging factory which in the 1980s was developed into spaces for creatives of various ilks…..
…..Bismarckstrasse 50 is still home to creatives of various ilks, and is still home to a gallery, Galerie Martina Kaiser, where in context of the 2020 Passagen Interior Design Week a new generation of Cologne designers are presenting new projects, projects raised not in the agitations, turmoils and transformations of 1980s West Germany that informed the Pentagonia’s works, but rather in the calm, alpine forests of Austria’s Bregenzerwald.
Yet objects no less expressive for the change of air…….
Design Gruppe Pentagon @ the Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Cologne
Within any regular pentagon one can locate, in numerous, manifold, relationships, the Golden Ratio, that centuries old guarantor of harmony, balance, beauty….
And within an irregular Pentagon?
With the exhibition Design Gruppe Pentagon the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Cologne search for an answer in context of the 1980s Rheinland design quintet…….
Passagen Cologne 2019: Generation Köln
Fortune, we are told, favours the brave. Misfortune the reckless, but fortune the brave.
Thus, summing all the bravery we could muster, we descended into the unknown of the Bunker am Bahngleis and the exhibition Generation Köln…..*
Waidblicke #3 – Stadtgeschichte(n) @ smow Cologne
How many stories can a city tell? There are the public, collective, communal stories told by its buildings, by its peoples, by its industries, by the development of its cultural institutions and through the actions of famous/infamous citizens; but there are also the myriad private, individual stories, the scurrilous, the appalling, the romantic, the comic, the tragic, the improbable, and of course the secret, whispered, ones.
At the risk of sounding like a city marketing platform, a city is the sum of its stories. And is thereby always in flux.
For Waidblicke #3 smow Cologne invited selected professional and student architects, photographers and designers to reflect on Cologne’s Stadtgeschichte(n) – City (Hi)stories
Kölner Design Preis/Toby E. Rodes Award 2018: Winners & Exhibition
With a new name, but a familiar format, the 2018 Kölner Design Preis once again celebrates the city’s design students and creative colleges, including an exhibition of all nominated projects in the Cologne Museum für Angewandte Kunst.
#campustour 2018: KISDparcours, Köln International School of Design, Cologne, Germany
Derived from the French parcourir, the parcours is perhaps historically most popularly associated with equine show-jumping, the challenge of negotiating an artificial obstacle course; more recently it has become popular in context of human show-jumping, the challenge of negotiating an urban obstacle course.
Approaching the Köln International School of Design 2018 KISDparcours semester and graduation exhibition we hoped the obstacles to be negotiated would be of the mental, philosophical, type……
Passagen Cologne 2018: Generation Köln
As regular readers will appreciate, we’re no great approvers of lumping individual creatives together under one umbrella term; always strikes us as being an unnecessary distraction, and (more than) a little counterproductive.
We are however most appreciative that following an inaugural presentation at Kazerne Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week 2017, the showcase Generation Köln is now being presented, as it were, on home turf.
Passagen Cologne 2018: In Arbeit. Prototypen von Thomas Schnur und Klemens Grund
As in art, music or literature, the path in design from an idea to its realisation is rarely straight. And not always achieved. Or at least not immediately. Consequently every designer, as with every artist, every musician or every author, has projects which began their journey’s full of hope,but, then, for whatever reason…….
With the showcase “in Arbeit” Cologne based designers Thomas Schnur and Klemens Grund present some of their projects which are, still, “in Arbeit”
Der Stuhl des Architekten – Sitzmöbel von Egon Eiermann @ the Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft Cologne
One of Germany’s leading post-war architects and architectural theoreticians, Egon Eiermann was also one of post-war Europe’s most important chair designers, not just in context of what he realised, but also in context of what he worked towards realising and the reasons why. With the exhibition Cologne celebrate that legacy.
Kölner Design Preis 2017: Winners and Exhibition
Algorithms as dance, a tactile architecture guide and a future-proof flat sharing platform.
On Thursday October 26th the winners of the 2017 Kölner Design Preis were unveiled at a ceremony in the city’s Museum für Angewandte Kunst, MAKK; and where until Sunday November 19th the three winning, and all nominated, projects, can be viewed in a specially conceived Kölner Design Preis 2017 exhibition.
Passagen Design Week Cologne 2017: 5 Years kaschkasch
With the exhibition 5 Years kaschkasch Florian Kallus and Sebastian Schneider aka studio kaschkasch celebrate, well, five years of studio kaschkasch.
Cologne Creative: Felix Stark – As a designer you always have to make it clear what you stand for
Continuing our series of posts on creativity in Cologne, historic and contemporary, we met up with product designer Felix Stark.
Köln International School of Design – KISDparcours 2016
An important commercial, financial and administrative centre since the middle ages Cologne has contributed greatly to the development of European
Cologne Creative: kaschkasch
We first became aware of Florian Kallus and Sebastian Schneider a.k.a design studio kaschkasch before they were kaschkasch, when they
Cologne Creative: Thomas Schnur
Cologne isn’t a city which creativity only visits every January in the form of the IMM Cologne furniture trade fair
smow Blog Interview: Wolfgang Laubersheimer – Making is back, that is fantastic and is something I’m certain will change design
In our post from the exhibition Schrill Bizarr Brachial. Das Neue Deutsche Design der 80er Jahre at the Bröhan Museum