Category: Designer
Khudi Bari by Marina Tabassum on the Vitra Campus, Weil am Rhein
The word on the wind was that Tsuyoshi Tane’s Garden House was to be the last addition to the Vitra Campus, Weil am Rhein.
The wind appears to have been ill-informed, thankfully, for with the project Khudi Bari by Marina Tabassum the Vitra Campus has a new addition that expands and extends it more than just physically…….
smow Blog Interview: Timon and Melchior Grau – We want to create lighting moods that really touch you
Kaesz Homes 1925-1960. The homes of designer couple Kaesz Gyula and Lukáts Kató at Walter Rózsi Villa, Budapest
“A bútortörténet az általános művészettörténet és a művelődéstörténet egyik speciális ága” opined the Hungarian interior designer, furniture designer, editor and educator Kaesz Gyula in 1962, ‘furniture history is a special branch of general art history and cultural history’, continuing that ‘its task is to acquaint you with the part of human creative work that creates the human environment and means of use. Through the individual objects, we get to know the age, the production and social relations, which determined the living conditions, aspirations, and struggles of the people who created and used the objects. The objects of the human environment are meant to satisfy various needs. From the way these needs are met, we can learn about the characteristics of the human environment of each age’, adding that furniture, ‘inform[s] us precisely about the development of each society’s comfort needs, technical and artistic creative methods’.
And not just a society can be studied, according to Kaesz, through its furniture but also ‘the tastes of their former owners. Hobbies, whims, thoughts and needs are expressed in the forms of furniture’.1
With the exhibition Kaesz Homes 1925-1960 the Walter Rózsi Villa, Budapest, invite you into the former home of Kaesz Gyula and his wife, the graphic designer, packaging designer and illustrator, Lukáts Kató where their furniture, and interior design, allows one to not only ‘get to know’ two interesting, important and informative 20th century Hungarian creatives, ‘get to know’ their tastes, hobbies, whims, thoughts and needs, but also allows one to better approach the development of furniture and design, the path of ‘cultural history’, in both Hungary and in Europe…….
Stühle zum (Be)Sitzen, a smow Pop-up at the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig
In the exhibtion A Chair and You at the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig, there is more than A Chair and You can look at them, study them, explore them, converse with them. But not sit on them.
In the presentation Stühle zum (Be)Sitzen on the first floor landing of the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig, there is more than A Chair and You can look at them, study them, explore them, converse with them. And sit on them.
Thirteen chairs which unite more than just thirteen definitions of ‘A Chair’, and more than just thirteen different seating experiences…..
Science Fiction Design: From Space Age to Metaverse at the Vitra Design Museum Schaudepot, Weil am Rhein
Human society’s fascination with leaving behind the limitations and fragilities and vagaries of the human being, and of the planet we all call home, is almost as old as human society, and is inextricably linked with developments in technology, science, engineering and human society’s understandings of itself and its environments; amongst the earliest descriptions, for example, of flying to the moon being Francis Godwin’s 1638 book The Man in the Moone, an account of a journey, and of the beings who call the moone home, published just 28 years after Galileo Galilei published the first detailed sketches of the surface of the moon. As soon as we ‘knew’ about the moon in ‘detail’, we wanted to be there. And wanted to get to know the natives. Whom we assumed existed.
And a fascination that, for want of a better phrase, took off, as space travel became a reality in the second half of the 20th century, and that at a time when there was an active desire to rebuild global human society after the trials, tribulations and Wars of the first half of the 20th century, a very real desire to leave behind the most recent chapter in human (hi)story and to write a new one. Ideally in a place far, far away from recent memory. And a desire to establish that new human society with the aid of that newest of human species: the designer. A species who had evolved from a synthesis of architects and artists and artisans in the course of the first third of the 20th century with the promise of providing for all.
With the actual moon landing on July 20th 1969, just 331 years after that first moone landing, anything and everything became possible. Science fiction was becoming science reality.
With Science Fiction Design: From Space Age to Metaverse the Vitra Design Museum Schaudepot, Weil am Rhein explore science fiction and design, science fiction as design, design as science fiction, and in doing so invite you to re-imagine, re-construct, re-frame familiar narratives…….
5 New Architecture & Design Exhibitions for August 2024
August 2024 is Olympics, or at least the first half is. And while, yes, you could stay home and watch events in Paris unfold from the comfort of your sofa and fridge, you could also undertake a little cerebral, contemplative, conceptual, fencing, judo, weightlifting, skateboarding, and/or gymnastics of your own.
Go for that inner gold!!! Seek to become a new personal best!!!
Our five recommended cultural sporting venues for August 2024 can be found, not in Paris, or at least not directly, but in Thun, Melbourne, Maastricht, Värnamo and Philadelphia…..
Lucia Moholy: Exposures at Kunsthalle Praha
“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 Praha allow one to approach a better understanding that for Lucia Moholy the most important “other material” of documentation was photography, and employs Lucia Moholy’s photography, and her spoken, written and printed material, to enable an imparting of enhanced knowledge of Lucia Moholy and on the (hi)story of 20th century creativity…….
Re:Generation. Climate change in a natural World Heritage Site – and what we can do about it at Park Sanssouci, Potsdam
As an (apparent) unending forest criss-crossed by visual axes and dotted with meadows, Park Sanssouci in Potsdam stands proxy for the garden design, the garden architecture, of 18th and 19th century Europe.
As an (apparent) unending forest criss-crossed by visual axes and dotted with meadows, Park Sanssouci in Potsdam stands proxy for the power and wealth and pomp and glory of 18th and 19th century Prussia.
According to the Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg, who today are responsible for maintaining and managing Park Sanssouci, some 80% of Park Sanssouci’s trees are damaged, ill.
As an (apparent) unending forest criss-crossed by visual axes and dotted with meadows, Park Sanssouci in Potsdam stands proxy for the consequences and effects of climate change.
A reality employed in Re:Generation to, as the full title helpfully explains, discuss those effects – and the what we can do about it…….
The Historia Supellexalis: “W” for Wegneritis
Wegneritis
An Itch; A Compulsion; A Just One Good Chair
5 New Architecture & Design Exhibitions for July 2024
As Sara Coleridge so very, very, nearly phrased it:
“Hot July brings cooling showers,
Apricots, and inspiring days in architecture and design museums”1
Our five apricots recommendations for inspiring new exhibitions opening in the, invariably, far, far, too hot July of 2024 take us all to Luxembourg, Remagen, Warsaw, Utrecht and Susch…….
Nils Holger Moormann presents Salone di Aschau 2024
Ciao Salone!
Servus Salone!!
Amongst the European designer furniture publishers Nils Holger Moormann has long stood out from the crowd, and that primarily because Nils Holger Moormann has never sought the crowd, has always done Nils Holger Moormann’s thing, not the crowd’s thing, and who in doing such has very much, and very justifiably, attracted a crowd lot of individuals.
Thus while other furniture publishers dance to the tune of the international trade fair crowd, Nils Holger Moormann organise their own trade fair.
Ciao Milano!
Servus Aschau!!
Design Without Borders 2024, Saluton!
Celebrating its 20th anniversary edition in 2024 we charted, and discussed, the (hi)story of Design Without Borders in our conversation with the institutions initiators, organisers and curators Szilvia Szigeti and Tamás Radnóti, and so refer you there dear readers for the background. And also refer you to our post from the 2014 edition, the last time we visited Design Without Borders in its native Budapest; a last visit in Budapest not for lack on interest, far from it, but simply on account of pressures of time.
In 2024 we did however manage to make it timeously to the Hungarian capital, and up the hill to the Kiscell Museum, Design Without Borders’ home since 2020, and over the coming days and weeks we will bring you some of our thoughts and reflections on some of those works and projects and positions experienced.
Here we will quickly note…
Munich Creative Business Week 2024 Compact: The Biophilic Workspace at the Technische Universität München
Bauhaus and National Socialism at Klassik Stiftung Weimar
From the Bauhaus Museum Weimar you can see the Buchenwald concentration camp; from the Bauhaus Museum Weimar you can exactly locate the violence and inhumanity of the NSDAP.
However from Bauhaus Weimar and Bauhaus Dessau and Bauhaus Berlin locating the NSDAP is a lot less straightforward; from the Bauhauses seeing the NSDAP is not as simple, the view towards the NSDAP being as it is partially hidden, lightly distorted, unfocussed, by the mists of an unquestioned post-War narrative. And that despite, or perhaps exactly because of, the various and varied links between the Bauhauses and the NSDAP.
With the exhibition programme Bauhaus and National Socialism the Klassik Stiftung Weimar enable a much clearer view on not just the NSDAP from the perspective of the Bauhauses, but also allow for more nuanced reflections on a still astoundingly relevant, if often incompletely discussed, chapter in European (hi)story…….
A Chair and You at the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig
In 1949 Edgar Kaufmann Jr. the, then, Director of the Industrial Design Department at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, reflected, not uncritically, that “as more and more new chairs become available to the buying public, the problem of selection begins to be bewildering.” A truism that has lost nothing in contemporaneousness over the decades; and also a very nice eyewitness observation from the early days of the rise of the post 1939-45 War American furniture design industry. And of its associated, parasitic, mimics.
“Is it true”, Kaufmann asks, in context of his reflections, “that our needs are so varied?”1
Just one of a great many questions of chairs, seats, sitting and sitters A Chair and You at the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig, encourages, empowers, you to reflect upon…….
Munich Creative Business Week 2024 Compact: Earth Centered Design. An Exhibition at the Hochschule München
PURe Visions. Plastic Furniture Between East and West at the Kunstgewerbemuseum, Dresden
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 likes of a Christian Dell developed interesting, instructive, objects from novel plastics, ably demonstrated the possibilities of the novel materials contemporary chemistry was bringing forth, their use in objects of daily use remained limited, not least on account of problems of structural stability and durability; limited, save, arguably, and unfortunately, Bakelite’s use in the construction of Walter Maria Kersting’s Volksempfänger radio, that piece of contemporary design the NSDAP used so efficiently and so knowledgeably to transport their nefarious agenda and toxic propaganda into every home. Yes, there is a lesson to be learned there.
The 1930s however also saw the first patents for a novel synthetic plastic that would not only demonstrate the possibilities of the novel materials, but which had the characteristics to enable it to make those possibilities realities: polyurethane
A material that, it’s fair to say, on its commercial introduction in the 1960s, revolutionised not only furniture design but furniture production as fundamentally as a Michael Thonet once had with his adaptation of the dark art of woodbending. While the colour polyurethane enabled brought a vitality and freshness and exuberance that, it’s equally fair to say, revolutionised interiors. Allowed 1960s and 70s interiors to Pop.
And while today polyurethanes are more critically analysed than they once were, their use is rightly questioned today, as is the proposition of alternatives actively considered, the developments of the 1960s and 70s, the positions that were advanced in that period and the understandings of furniture that arose in that period remain.
If often popularly only very poorly, superficially, understood.
As is the (hi)story of furniture and interior design in the two Germanys of the 1960s and 70s.
As are the intersections of the political, economic, social (hi)stories of the two Germanys of the 1960s and 70s.
With PURe Visions. Plastic Furniture Between East and West the Kunstgewerbemuseum Dresden go deep into the (hi)story of polyurethane furniture in the two Germanys of the 1960s and 70s and thereby also allow one to approach better appreciations of the (hi)story of furniture and interior design in the two Germanys, and of the wider (hi)story of the two Germanys……
20 Years of Design Without Borders: “The human connections are the most important”
Given that ‘design’ is popularly associated with a limitless reality, an unrestrainable questioning, a pushing at the open doors of possibility, it does tend to get hemmed in quite a lot, we do tend to like place it within an awful lot of borders: geographic borders, category borders, practice borders, conceptual borders, historic borders, etc, etc, etc.
Or at least most of us do. For the past 20 years Budapest has been home to a borderless design, to Design Without Borders, an institution that has grown from a four day showcase featuring a handful of local protagonists to a six week exhibition programme presenting the work of some 200 international creatives, alongside concerts and film screenings.
Ahead of its 20th edition we met up with Szilvia Szigeti and Tamás Radnóti, instigators and curators of Design Without Borders, to discuss the past, present, future. And the hows, whos, whys……
