Colour Rush! An Installation by Sabine Marcelis at the Vitra Design Museum Schaudepot, Weil am Rhein
Amongst the many developments that have influenced and informed the path of furniture and interior design in the past 120ish years one must, without question, count developments in context of colour.
Whereas in previous centuries colours were limited in their availability, range and durability, recent decades have seen not only progress in that availability, range and durability, and as such ever more possibilities in our use of colour, but also seen increasing study of psychology and colour and of developments in understandings of human perception of colour, ever increasing appreciations of how colours exist beyond the physical and chemical. And an ever increasing use of colour in marketing, a creeping commercialisation of colour.
With the installation Colour Rush! Rotterdam based designer Sabine Marcelis transforms the Vitra Design Museum Schaudepot into a space for differentiated considerations on colour and our furniture and interiors, on the colours of our furniture and interiors. And in doing so also allows for some fresh insights not only into the Vitra Design Museum collection, but what that collection can teach us all about furniture and interior design over the past 120ish years…….
#officetour Milestones – A chair “just high enough that one can sit half-standing”
“For men who have to write a lot, and over prolonged periods, a desk at which they can work standing up is an indispensable piece of furniture for altering their posture and for maintaining their health”, opined Journal der Moden in May 1786. An age when, famously, only men wrote.
Yet advantageous and positive as standing to write was, prolonged standing could, as Journal der Moden notes, lead to tiredness.
A solution was however at hand for all who preferred working at a standing height desk over a prolonged period: a chair, “or a so called donkey … on which one sits as if on a saddle, and which must be just high enough that one can sit half-standing…”1
A half-standing sitting solution whose nickname can be readily derived from the proposed sitting position.
And a half-standing sitting solution that for all it is thoroughly familiar today, was novel, one could almost argue revolutionary, and even enlightened, in 1786…….
Blurred Lines or What if Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke designed furniture?
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Vitra Design Museum: Lightopia
“My, my, my, Delilah! Why, why, why, Delilah!”
The morning of Friday September 27th 2013 was one of those misty autumn occasions that cause SANAA’s immense new Vitra Factory Building in Weil am Rhein to merge, almost unseen, with the grey background. Even Herzog & de Meuron’s new Basel Messe complex was reduced to nothing more grand than a continuation of the uncaring monotonous sky. The glitzing, shimmering palace of high summer just the weak shadow of a memory.
And so it was perhaps fitting that the Vitra Design Museum choose this dank September morn to open their latest exhibition, “Lightopia”, an exhibition devoted to light.
For today was a clear warning, in the coming months we will all be in need of a little light.
George Nelson meets Alvar Aalto. Extended Version.
In our post on Vitra’s purchase of the Finnish furniture producer Artek we quoted from a letter George Nelson wrote
Vitra acquire Artek. Eames meets Aalto. Again.
At Design Miami Basel 2013 one of the more impressive presentations was without question the collection of Alvar Aalto furniture
Passenger Terminal Expo 2012: Pascal Berberat, Vitra Airport Division
We suspect the reason we write so much about designer furniture in an airport context is simply because of the
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(smow) congratulates: 20 Years Vitra Design Museum
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George Nelson Ceramic Clocks
Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 in B minor. The Trial by Franz Kafka. Madonna and Child with St John and
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Idling on the internet the other day we inadvertently clicked on an advertisement. Fortunately. For the link took us to
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It must be a summer thing. Not only are our newspapers and magazines full of authors recommending their chums books,