Stockholm Design Week 2023 Compact: Cinderella by Anna Kraitz for Design House Stockholm
When is an ironing board, not an ironing board?
When it’s Cinderella by Anna Kraitz for Design House Stockholm.
Stockholm Furniture Fair 2023: Say Hej! to… Ondulé by Anton Björsing for Karl Andersson & Söner
Stockholm Furniture Fair 2023: Say Hej! to… Nychair X Rocking by Takeshi Nii & Makoto Shimazaki
Stockholm Furniture Fair 2023: (A brief) Introduction…….
Hej!
Hej!
Hej!
Hej!
Hej!
Hej!
The rhythm of Stockholm Furniture Fair is given as much by the greetings ringing through the venue as by the layout of the halls or by the products on show; wherever one goes the background to everything is the sound of a simple, but potent, galvanising, word, concept, conveyed and returned…….
🧑 Hej!
Hej! 👩🏾
👵🏽 Hej!
Hej! 😀
🧔🏼 Hej!
Hej! 🤝🏾
But it’s been a while since we were last exposed to the joyous rhythm of Stockholm Furniture Fair. Or indeed to the rhythm of any furniture fair: the last fair we visited was, as it transpired, Stockholm in February 2020, just before, well… you know……. and in that intervening three years we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about if we ever would, ever should, venture to another furniture fair.
For even before Corona we were becoming increasingly tired of the furniture fair format, had on innumerable occasions sworn we would never, ever, set feet in a furniture fair ever again; before, in that resolute manner of ours, we would pack our bags and head off to another furniture fair. We once voluntarily visited eight in a year!!! While not wanting to visit any!!!1
For a great many years Twisterella by Ride was our ongoing earworm:
“If I don’t need anymore,
Why’s this bus taking me back again”
But after a Corona enforced absence, were we now finally, finally, over furniture fairs?
Had we finally got off the bus?
???
We weren’t sure. We believed we genuinely were, believed we genuinely had, but… you know how it is…….
So by way of trying to work out where we really were at, we thought we’d better try again; and it seemed to make perfect sense to begin that process of discovery where that process of questioning had so abruptly ended, by once again saying Hej! to Stockholm Furniture Fair…….
Stockholm Design Week 2023 Compact: Buone Nuove – Women Changing Architecture at l’Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Stoccolma
As any fule kno Italy has a long (hi)story in and of architecture, whereby it is predominately a (his)story of architecture: with Buone Nuove. Women Changing Architecture the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Stockholm, offer an introduction to an alternative narrative.
And to alternative futures…….
5 New Architecture & Design Exhibitions for February 2023
According to Germanic folklore: A wet February brings a fruitful year.
And that, we’d argue, not only in terms of vegetation, but also in terms of your individual personal development: a wet February meaning more time spent in museums and thus an enhanced opportunity to engage in meaningful and relevant and motivating discourses and discussions. An ideal environment in which to allow your appreciations of and positions to the world around you to optimally develop, swell, ripen and nourish.
So come on February…… Rain!!!
Our five recommended growth stimulating shelters for February 2023 can be found in Cologne, Stockholm, Hornu, Hamburg and Montréal…….
5 New Architecture & Design Exhibitions for April 2022
As here in the northern hemisphere winter cedes to spring, not only is nature once again reawakening from its long repose but so too is the international museum community; and that, one senses, with more vigour than in the most recent springs where the Covid pandemic induced upsetting of the established order of the museal ecosystem, through both enforced closures and fundamental disruptions of essential exhibition development processes, dimmed somewhat the promise of the annual spring blush.
In spring 2022, one sense from wandering through the global museum landscape, the vitality, and for all variety, has returned to that landscape.
Which is to be welcomed, for little is as effective in helping us all broaden our minds, expand our perspectives, appreciate unseen associations, free us from prejudices, develop as human beings and as members of a functioning society, than a good museum exhibition. For while a good TV programme or a good podcast can inform, they tend to do so in definitives and in an unyieldingly linear fashion: they tell, they know, just how things were, are, will be. And in their telling tend to leave you bereft of tools of your own. A good museum exhibition in contrast gives you information but primarily bequeaths you a framework in which to develop your own understandings and positions, to question, to challenge, to expand on that which is presented; ’tis but a invitation to let your mind wander as it sees fit. And that in an environment which is devoid of time and space, where you are free to jump about as you wish, go back, rush forward. Stop.
Start again somewhere else
noiɈɔɘɿib bɘɈɔɘqxɘnυ nɒ ni ɘvoM
Discover new, uncharted, paths.
Thus whereas you can leave a TV programme or a podcast with new information on the subject at hand; you can leave a well organised exhibition not only with new information on the subject at hand, but with your thoughts immersed in a completely different subject and with your mind stimulated, receptive, restless.
And broad, receptive, questioning, unihibited, objective minds freed of definitives are very, very, important at this moment in global (hi)story.
Thus, get thee to an exhibition!
Our five recommendations for exiting the space-time continuum in April 2022 can be found in Essen, Brussels, Stockholm, Linz and Helsinki…….
5 New Architecture & Design Exhibitions for February 2022
According to the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro February 7th marks the first day of spring.
Which strikes us, as we’re sure it does you, as a little early; however, there was reason in Varro’s bold claim, for Varro further sets February 7th as the start of the year, and for all links February 7th with the rising of the west wind, a favourable, warming wind, whose arrival indicates the need to start cultivating your land and crops, specifically Varro advises, “these are things which should be done in the first period, from the rising of the west wind to the vernal equinox: All kinds of nurseries should be set out, orchards pruned, meadows manured, vines trenched and outcropping roots removed, meadows cleared, willow beds planted, grain-land weeded.”1
But not just the cultivation of your land and crops is important from the rising of the west wind to the vernal equinox, the cultivation of mind and spirit and character is of equal importance.
Our five non-agrarian cultivation tips for February 2022 can be found in Halle, Garðabær, Paris, Stockholm and Zürich…….
5 New Architecture & Design Exhibitions for October 2021
In days of yore October was known in Germanic lands as Weinmonat, Wine Month, Month of Wine, whereby thoughts were, unquestionably, less with the drink as with the grape and the harvest, and thus the promise of the new wine.
And in many regards our exhibition recommendations can be considered a monthly harvest of the new crop of architecture and design exhibitions; specifically, and staying in Germanic registers, an Auslese, a considered selection of those well ripened concepts and premises it is hoped will most excite an invigorate the palate both experienced and novice. Or the viewer, experienced or novice.
Our quintet of, possible, new, memorable vintages from Weinmonat 2021 can be found in Ulm, Stockholm, ’s-Hertogenbosch, Paris and Tokyo…….
5 New Architecture & Design Exhibitions for May 2021
According to Germanic folklore Mairegen bringt Segen, Rain in May brings blessings.
It also brings an excellent excuse to visit an architecture and/or design exhibition.
Our five recommended shelters from the showers in May 2021 can be found in Ulm, Stockholm, Baruth, Zürich and Hasselt……
Female Traces at the Museum of Furniture Studies, Stockholm
It’s not just the presence, or lack of, female designers in the contemporary furniture industry, nor just the presence, or lack of, female designers in museum exhibitions that informs and influences understandings of the contribution of female designers to contemporary furniture design and the (hi)story of furniture design, it is also the presence, or lack of, female designers in design museum and applied arts museum collections, those depositories and reserves of furniture design’s history and sources of inspiration for furniture design’s future.
With the exhibition Female Traces the Museum of Furniture Studies Stockholm reflect on the gender mix of their own collection.
Stockholm Furniture Fair 2020: High Five!!
With the 2020 edition Stockholm Furniture Fair celebrates its 70th birthday.
Grattis på födelsedagen!
We did think about taking along a cake, but knew the halls of Stockholmsmässan would be filled to the rafters with Kanelbullar, as indeed would we.
And so by way of a present, a Stockholm Furniture Fair 2020 High 6!!
5 New Architecture & Design Exhibitions for October 2019
While it is important, and relevant, that the centenary of the opening of Bauhaus Weimar is used to delve a little deeper into the (hi)story of both the institution and inter-War Modernism, design and architecture is more than Bauhaus.
Thus following on from our October Bauhaus/inter-War Modernism focussed new exhibition recommendations, five more general, if anything but humdrum, architecture and design exhibitions opening in October 2019 in Groningen, Frankfurt, New York, Stockholm and Weil am Rhein…..
1989 – Culture and Politics @ The National Museum Stockholm
The Chinese government warning pro-democracy demonstrators to end their street protests. Central Americans risking their lives, and dodging border guards and fences, to cross into America in search of the, much vaunted, American Dream. A dogmatic right wing English Conservative government showing their contempt for the people of Scotland.
Thankfully, the world has moved on since 1989……
5 New Architecture & Design Exhibitions for September 2019
Whereas in the natural world spring ushers in new life but once a year, in the design museum world re-awakenings are biannual: a spring spring as curators awake from their winter hibernation and an autumn spring as they awake from their summer dormancy. Both bringing forth not only the promise of growth, energy, of a new esprit, of new experiences, new sensations, but confirming the eternal nature of existence, that we are but a moment on an endless spiralling continuum…….
Our five new stimulations for September 2019 can be found in Berlin, Helsinki, Weil am Rhein, Stockholm and ‘s-Hertogenbosch…….
Ung Svensk Form/Young Swedish Design 2019 Exhibition @ ArkDes Stockholm
For the fifth year in succession ArkDes, Sweden’s national centre for architecture and design, is hosting the Ung Svensk Form/Young Swedish Design award/platform exhibition: a showcase of 25 projects providing for 25 understandings of contemporary design in/from Sweden.
1980s – A new era in furniture design @ The Museum of Furniture Studies, Stockholm
No, it’s not all shoulder pads and garish colour clashes……. although……..
…….much more, with the exhibition 1980s – A new era in furniture design Stockholm’s Museum of Furniture Studies explore furniture design in that most politically, culturally, socially and economically fluid of decades, and, and not completely unrelated, a decade which not only brought fundamental changes to understandings of furniture design, but arguably brought more abrupt, more curt, more enduring changes than at any time since the 1920s.
Stockholm Furniture Fair 2019: High Five!!
As regular readers will be aware, in these dispatches we, very, very occasionally, quietly bemoan a certain monotony at furniture trade fairs, protest that, if you will, we regularly find ourselves wading through an homogenous mass.
On this occasion we will however let someone else make that observation on our behalf.
In his 2015 book Swedish Design: An Ethnography the American anthropologist Keith M. Murphy notes of a visit to the 2006 Stockholm Furniture Fair, “[T]he only problem was, so much of the stuff here looked so similar, and I had a difficult time anchoring myself in the exhibition’s plan”, continuing later that, “[T]he place is predominantly suffused not with a variety of different kinds of objects, but rather with a variety of different objects of the same general kind.”1
So 2006. So 2019.
Though interestingly he does also note that, “one cannot evade the impression that Sweden endures under a tyranny of simple forms and solid bright colours”. These days it’s more solid pastel tones, but…..
Such isn’t exclusive to Stockholm, but can be experienced wherever the furniture industry meet to display their wares. Clearly there are a host of varied, arguably inter-related, causes for such a situation, but here is neither the time nor the space to discuss them; the consequence, however, is that walking through the halls of any give trade fair one finds that while many objects do speak to you, they all tend to do so with a repetition of the same limited vocabularies, often in a very forced, insecure, equivocal manner, and which thus, very quickly, becomes tiresome.
However as Keith M Murphy also notes, “not everything fit [sic] the model” and there are not only always objects to be found with something interesting to say, but which say that in an intelligent, literate and engaging fashion.
And so, and as ever, with the understanding that we have inevitably missed and/or not properly understood several gems, a smow blog Stockholm Furniture Fair 2019 High 5!!
Stockholm Design Week 2019: The Baker’s House by Färg & Blanche
It’s been 8 years since we last visited an exhibition by Stockholm based studio Färg & Blanche.
Then 2011, back in the days when we still had our own teeth, our own hair, dreams and aspirations which were in our control, it was the exhibition 20 designers at BIOLOGISKA, one of the most memorable locations we’ve ever viewed an exhibition in. And despite having been in many an impressive venues since, a multi-storey 360 degree diorama populated by stuffed animals in a range of habitats, remains a firm favourite.
Now 2019, the venue equally as memorable, Emma Marga Blanche’s paternal great-grandparents late-19th century flat on the site of, and next, to their former Knäckebröd factory. A space seemingly caught in time while all around Södermalm has evolved from a largely working class district into one of Stockholm’s hipper.
The principle difference between 2011 and 2019 is that then Färg & Blanche presented works by themselves and selected chums, now it is all their own work.
#campustour 2018: Degree Exhibition, Konstfack, Stockholm, Sweden
While others spend their summers’ holidaying with families, barbecuing with friends or pretending to read novels on the balcony, at the beach and/or in the local park, we travel Europe visiting design school summer exhibitions and subsisting exclusively from falafel. It’s a curious, idiosyncratic, slightly tragic, way to spend your life, but it’s the one we’ve chosen, is in many regards the only road we’ve ever known. And so, as May’s warmth ceded to the heat of June, we made like Whitesnake…. Here We Go Again.
Our 2018 #campustour kicked off in Stockholm, a city as closely related with the Hanseatic League as smow, and specifically at Konstfack, Sweden’s largest and oldest art/craft/design school.
INSIDE architecture by Åke Axelsson, Jonas Bohlin, Mats Theselius @ Konstakademien, Stockholm
With the exhibition INSIDE architecture by Åke Axelsson, Jonas Bohlin, Mats Theselius Sweden’s Konstakademien, Royal Academy, pay tribute not to the architecture of Messrs Axelsson, Bohlin & Theselius, but to the interior and furniture design work of three: and in doing so neatly underscore the function of the interior architect and the important link between interior design and furniture design.
