Category: Exhibitions and Shows
5 New Architecture & Design Exhibitions for September 2024
Across the northern hemisphere September generally marks the start of the academic year, be that in primary, secondary, tertiary or quaternary education contexts, as students at all levels return to their studies after the long summer break.
And while quinary education may not need an official start, or indeed a structured year, there is not only something appropriate in opening a new chapter in your studies alongside that of your fellow students, but for all the number and variety of new architecture and design exhibitions opening globally every September, as the international museum community return from their long summer break, positively invites you do so.
September 2024 being no exception. We could easily have published three lists of recommendations, decided to stick with the traditional one, a list that takes us all to Hamburg, Brühl, Falkenberg, Katowice and Bonn, but for all to the dominion of expanded appreciations of architecture, design, society, possibilities, and thus fires the desire to travel ever further, to continue your eduction…….
Ois Anders: Major Projects in Bavaria 1945-2020 at the Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte, Regensburg
In 1998 the then, German President, and native of Bavaria, Roman Herzog opined, “In München sind Lederhose und Laptop eine Symbiose eingegangen”, ‘In Munich, lederhose and laptops have entered into a symbiosis’.
One of innumerable partisan puffs for the Freistaat over the decades by Bavarian politicians; but also a very neat political statement implying that the popular image of Bavaria as being all about mountains, forests, lakes, rivers and rugged herders on livestock dense alms, was no longer valid. That Bavaria had changed, certainly was changing.
With the exhibition Ois Anders: Major Projects in Bavaria 1945 – 2020 the Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte, Regensburg, explore and discuss developments in Bavaria since the second half of the 20th century, and in doing so provide for wider reflection on not only change processes, but how we all view not only Bavaria, but the world around us in general…….
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…….
Grassimesse 2024: Meet the selected exhibitors…….
While the rest of the international design museum community retreat from the warmth of the summer sun, taking shelter in the cool of their depots and archives, Leipzig’s Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst are busy preparing for one of its annual highlights: Grassimesse. A craft, applied art and design fair instigated in 1920 which has witnessed, and survived, the highs and lows of the past century in Leipzig and environs. And which since 1920 has been by invitation only: anyone and everyone can apply, but only those who can convince the international jury of the quality of their work, the conceptual quality, the material quality, the technical quality, et al of their work, are granted access to the institution.
That first Grassimesse jury was populated by the likes of, for example, and amongst many others, Peter Behrens, Walter Gropius, Gerhard Marcks, Josef Hoffmann, Bruno Paul or Richard Riemerschmid1, the 2024 jury featuring in addition to Olaf Thormann, Director of the Grassi Museum and Sabine Epple, Curator of the Museum’s Modern Collection, and since 2000 responsible for the Grassimesse, the likes of, Christianne Weber-Stoeber, the former director of the Deutsches Goldschmiedehaus, Hanau, Chantal Prod’Hom, the former director of the Musée de Design et D’Arts Appliqués Contemporains, mudac, Lausanne, or Toni Piskac, the former Head of Workplace Consulting & Space Planning at Vitra and who now runs the interior architecture practice studio tnpx.
A 2024 Grassimesse jury who recently convened, a 2024 Grassimesse jury who have now passed judgement……
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…….
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!!
Natalia Romik. Hideouts. Architecture of Survival at the Jewish Museum, Frankfurt
“There is terror and panic in our city”, wrote the, then, 14 year old Clara Schwarz of life in, then, Żółkiew, Poland, today, Zhovkva, Ukraine, in the summer of 1942 of life under German occupation, “the Jews are building bunkers of all kinds: underground, double walls, anywhere they can find a spot to hide”.1
For Clara and her family that “spot” was a “3 metres square and a meter and a half deep” bunker under a house, a bunker dug out by Clara and other children with their bare hands; a “spot” that saved 10 people from murder and/or deportation in the Gestapo raid of November 1942. And which was subsequently expanded to a “10- by 14- metre” bunker which saved 18 individuals from being interned in the new Żółkiew Ghetto in December 1942. A bunker, a “dank, unsanitary place”, under a house, in which Clara her family and neighbours lived for 18 months.
And just one of thousands of hideouts used by Jews across Europe in the 1930s and 40s; thousands for which nine stand proxy in Natalia Romik. Hideouts. Architecture of Survival at the Jewish Museum, Frankfurt, an exhibition which aside from helping focus attention on the terror, brutality and inhumanity of the NSDAP and standing testimony to those men, women and children forced to endure that terror, brutality and inhumanity, allows for differentiated reflections on both concealment and on the built environment, on the complexity of our relationships with the environments we build…….
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
Munich Creative Business Week 2024, Servus!
Established in 2012, so a good three and half years after smow Blog, just sayin’, Munich Creative Business Week, MCBW, is today, according to its own claim, “Germany’s largest design event”. A claim we see absolutely no reason to doubt, but also haven’t tried to verify. Primarily because we see so little reason to doubt it. Despite our famed cynicism.
Initiated by bayern design, Bavaria’s “international design competence centre”, and from the very beginning known as Munich Creative Business Week… which, and digressing slightly, is a perplexing decision for an English title in the normally so Heimat fixated Mia San Mia Bavaria; a corner of the contemporary Germany that, in many regards, is still smarting that it was forced to join Prussia in a unified German Empire rather than remain the independent Alpine nation many Bavarians still believe it to be. Having not yet heard the result of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Most odd.
And while over the years the MCBW format has altered, as these things tend to do, it has generally always featured talks, conferences, seminars, workshops etc alongside exhibitions, showcases and presentations. A format that although at times can get a little too ‘brand’ focussed for our liking, often, for our taste, focusses a little too heavily on the ‘business’ of its title rather than the ‘creative’, can at times forget that the ‘business’ is but necessary in order to allow the ‘creativity’, to enable the ‘creativity’ to develop and evolve, and not a ‘creativity’ that is the basis for a ‘business’, the ‘creative’ isn’t a commodity, and can also have an unfortunate hang to typography, yet despite such thoroughly subjective, and arguably unfair, positions on our part, especially as concerns typography, MCBW always offers a varied programme across the city which invariably integrates a pleasingly wide variety of institutional and industry and civic partners. And, certainly of late, a varied programme staged in context of an over-arching theme; not a theme all components need must respond to or correspond with, but which does set the tone of the event: following Moving Horizons in 2022 and Why disruption unleashes creativity in 2023, in 2024 MCBW is being staged under the banner: How to co-curate with nature. There’s that English again. Most, most, odd.
A MCBW that over the years we have always enjoyed and learned from, has always been entertaining and instructive to visit; if, admittedly, a MCBW we have been but infrequent visitors of, and that for no other reason than calender clashes: MCBW used to be in March, and we tend to be busy in March. And only rarely in the vicinity of Munich in March. Since 2022 it’s been staged in May. We’re assuming not because of our calendars. But May is more convenient.
And in 2024 we did indeed make. A bit late. But we did make it.
In 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, and some of our thoughts and reflections on Munich Creative Business Week 2024 as an event. Munich Creative Business Week 2024 as a co-curation with nature.
Full details on Munich Creative Business Week 2024 can be found at www.mcbw.de
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……
