The Grassimesse smow-Designpreis – Don’t miss out like Reich, Wagenfeld, László, Brandt et al

Although the Grassimesse has been staged, with readily understandable pauses, since 1920, the Grassimesse smow-Designpreis is being staged for the first time in 2023.

Which means a highly impressive roster of innovative, intelligent, imaginative, informative, designers from back in the day can’t win it. Have, if one so will, missed out

But you can win it and the associated €2,500.

Or can if your reading this before Friday May 12th Sunday May 21st, the new extended, deadline for entries.

Otherwise you’ve also missed out.

You’ve now missed out.

Putting you in an illustrious, if very unfortunate, group along with the likes of…….

The Grassimesse smow-Designpreis 1923: A Fantasy Shortlist

The 2023 edition of the Grassimesse Leipzig will see the inaugural awarding of the €2,500 smow-Designpreis. The first dedicated design prize in the institution’s long (hi)story. Entries are were open until Friday May 12th.

But what if that first Grassimesse smow-Designpreis had been awarded not in 2023, but 1923?

Who might have won?

Who would the 1923 Grassimesse jury have selected from the many possible candidates?

????

A smow Blog fantasy final four…….

The Furniture of Lilly Reich and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: The Early Years

In 1977 Ludwig Glaeser, curator of the Mies van der Rohe Archive at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, opinioned that “it is certainly more than a coincidence that [Mies van der Rohe’s] involvement in furniture and exhibition design began in the same year as his personal relationship with Lilly Reich.”¹

A statement that has in many regards come to define understandings of the furniture designs of both Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich.

An understanding that “is certainly more than a coincidence”. It is wrong. Certainly in terms of furniture design.

And a statement and understanding whose clarification not only provides an excellent starting point for an exploration of the furniture designs of Lilly Reich and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, but also for some reflections on the (hi)story of furniture design……..

smow Blog Design Calendar: June 16th 1885 – Happy Birthday Lilly Reich!

In a letter in 2008 to the editors of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians concerning remarks in an article on the staged illumination of Mies van der Rohe’s skeletal frame constructions, the architecture historian Kathleen James-Chakraborty refers to the “linking of Heinrich Tessenow’s Festspielhaus of 1910-12 in Hellerau with the installation for the glass industry that Mies designed (in collaboration with Lilly Reich, whom Petty does not mention) for the Stuttgart Werkbund exhibition in 1927.”¹

“(in collaboration with Lilly Reich, whom Petty does not mention)”

(in collaboration with Lilly Reich, whom history so often does not mention, or when then fleetingly and sparingly, and which thus tends to leave Lilly Reich’s oeuvre in the shadows. Not least in the shadows of the staged illumination of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe…….)