Budapest Design Week 2024 Compact: Uniqueness in Mass Production by Fehérvári Panna Nóra
Budapest Design Week 2024, Szia!
Much as with the narrator of Half Man Half Biscuit’s ‘I was a teenage armchair Honvéd fan’ we’ve also long “dreamt about a love affair in far-off Budapest”.
Unlike said narrator however our ongoing yearning doesn’t revolve around a football club in the Kispest district of the city whose black an red was once worn by the likes of Grosics Gyula, Kocsis Sándor, Bozsik József or Puskás Ferenc, but revolve around design.
Nor are we hankering after a golden age of either Hungarian football or Hungarian design, entertaining and informative as both unquestionably are, rather our focus is very much contemporary design in and from Hungary.
But perhaps the decisive difference between us and HMHB’s nostalgic narrator is that while he is content to sit passively in an armchair, we actively search for that design, we actively search for a differentiated interpretation, re-imagination, of an ‘armchair’, on the streets of Budapest.
Or did….. then came Covid and the Hungarian capital was as far removed as the years when Grosics, Kocsis, Bozsik, Puskás et al made Budapest a by-word for contemporary football.
2024 we’re back, have already been back. Several times. And are back once again for the annual Budapest Design Week……
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…….
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…
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……
Otthon Design Budapest 2024 Compact: Bold Collection by András Kerékgyártó for Brave Home
smow Blog Interview: Line and Round – It is a bit of a mission impossible to try to make a career as a furniture designer in Hungary
Line and Round, I O, was established in Budapest in 2017 by Annabella Hevesi, a Masters graduate from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design and Gábor Bella, a Masters graduate from the “School of Life”, with a background in carpentry and numerous years experience in a variety of construction/interior/design fields, including the creation, development and realisation of escape room games, a concept that enjoys a particular popularity in Hungary, and in which context Annabella and Gábor met and began their professional cooperation.
A cooperation that in the six years since it has been staged as Line and Round has seen Annabella and Gábor develop and realise a variety of interior and furniture design projects including, for example, the creation of a locker room and press conference space for the Sopron Basket basketball team, numerous hotel and private interior projects, and the Burnt Geometry collection, Line and Round’s first self-initiated furniture collection, and part of that presentation at the 2023 Grassimesse, Leipzig, that saw Line and Round win the inaugural smow-Designpreis, or more accurately co-win the inaugural smow-Designpreis alongside Nürnberg based glassmaker Cornelius Réer.
Following their success in Leipzig we caught up Annabella and Gábor, virtually, online, to chat about their work, approaches and the realities of life as designers in the contemporary Hungary, but began by asking how Line and Round came to be, how Line and Round liberated itself from the escape room game industry…….
Grassimesse 2023: smow-Designpreis Co-Winners – Annabella Hevesi / Line and Round IO & Cornelius Réer
Let’s be honest, it wouldn’t be smow if it followed the rules and did that which you’d expected it to.
Thus it should have come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that the inaugural Grassimesse smow-Designpreis produced not the expected one, but two, joint, co-winners: Budapest based designer Annabella Hevesi and her studio Line and Round I O and Nürnberg based glassmaker Cornelius Réer…….
Vienna Design Week 2023: Design Without Borders at Collegium Hungaricum
Established in Budapest in 2004 by textile designer Szilvia Szigeti and her interior designer husband Tamás Radnóti, Design Without Borders understands itself, and summarising to the point of inaccuracy, as a platform for international design dialogue across, or perhaps more accurately indifferent to, not only national borders but borders of genre, scale, approach, position et al.
By way of preparing for the platform’s forthcoming 20th birthday a showcase of projects presented, hosted, by Design Without Borders over the past two decades is being staged in context of Vienna Design Week 2023.
A presentation that allows some insights into the aforementioned understandings of itself, and also access to some reflections on the realities of contemporary design in Europe…….
smow blog Interview: Architecture Uncomfortable Workshop – We don’t believe form and function are closed, there is always a degree of personal freedom and personal interpretation.
As we’ve noted in the past, Hungarian architects and designers made a valuable contribution to the development of post war
smow blog 2015. A pictorial review: November
November 2015 was a month of exhibitions, including Konstantin Grcic at the Grassi Museum Leipzig and Anton Corbijn at C/O
smow Blog Interview: András Kerékgyártó – We need a more open, honest discussion around design in Hungary
The history of furniture design has an unignorable, if subtle and background, Hungarian accent; Marcel Breuer was one of the driving forces at Bauhaus and through his work with steel tubing, moulded plywood and sheet steel he helped advance ideas of contemporary furniture design, and continues to inspire; Paul László was one of the genuine pioneers of American industrial design and contributed to George Nelson’s first Hermann Miller collection in 1948; and while Ernő Goldfinger may be best known for his brutalist architecture, and being the name giver for James Bond’s most aureate and alluring adversary, his experimental furniture works very neatly predict the development of post-modernism.
More recently Hungarian designers have had less to say, have been conspicuous by their absence on the international scene; however, as we noted in our post from the exhibition madeinhungary at Budapest Design Week 2014, that may be slowly changing.
Or rather Hungarian designer András Kerékgyártó noted that things may be slowly changing. We merely quoted him.
Budapest Design Week 2015: Tapas – Spanish Design for Food
As many of our regular readers will be aware, we don’t like food design. We would say “we can’t stomach
smow blog 2014. A pictorial review: October
……and continued over Budapest and on to Berlin – where amongst other delights we partook of the exhibitions Sensing the