...That is however all still to come, is a biography still to be written, and the path to that future leads over the 1920 Grassimesse Leipzig where Gertrud Lincke presented... Applications for Grassimesse Leipzig 2024 can be submitted until Wednesday May 15th...
...Alongside his own architecture, and design work, Josef Frank has been Professor for Building Construction Theory at the Kunstgewerbeschule since 1919, and in 1913 was a founding member of the Österreichische Werkbund, an alliance of creatives and industry modelled on the Deutsche Werkbund, and who were represented at the inaugural Grassimesse Leipzig by three of their more active members: the graphic and toy designer Emmy Zweybrück-Prochaska, the textile designer, and future ceramicist, Helene Dörr, and by Josef Frank... And while in no sense ignoring the works of Zweybrück-Prochaska or Dörr, far from it, we may well return to them one day, and we do appreciate that through not discussing them and their work in more detail here we are, will be, contributing to their future popular anonymity, the singular way we view the world means that our focus at Grassimesse 1920 is and was very much on the furniture of Frank, who used the occasion of Grassimesse Leipzig 1920 to present...
...And now at Grassimesse, Leipzig, 1920 where Elisabeth von Baczko presented... Applications for Grassimesse Leipzig 2024 can be submitted until Wednesday May 15th...
...After several years of preparation, and a lot of, at times (very) heated, discussion, this past March saw the staging of the inaugural Grassimesse Leipzig in the city's Rathaus... Richard Graul, Director of the Leipzig Kunstgewerbemuseum by way of a response to, an answer to, the increasing concerns amongst many professional creatives regarding the quality of contemporary objects of daily use presented at the bi-annual Leipzig Fair, for all the quality of the novel machine produced goods of contemporary industry, the Grassimesse intends to be not only a platform for presenting the highest quality of contemporary craft, applied art and design, but also to be a platform for exchange and mediation between creatives and industry and commerce, and thereby seeks to help to stimulate an increase in the quality, usefulness, beauty and value for money of the everyday goods of contemporary life...
...Vitra A Fehlbaum; A Campus; A Commonwealth According to the Sagas of the Dolls of Wood, that most authoritative account of the early (hi)story of the Commonwealth of Vitra, the contemporary Vitronians trace their origins back to a joining of forces of the Graeter, a Basel based people whose primary trade was the creation of display systems for shops and shop windows, and the Birsfelden Fehlbaum, a primarily office based people at that time under the guidance of a Willi and an Erika; a Willi and an Erika Fehlbaum who not only assumed guidance over the newly united peoples but also instigated a slow expansion of the shop furniture of the Graeter to a collection of items of practical, everyday, use in and for houses, a, at that time, novel accommodation concept in the Basel/Birsfelden region... And a shift away from the Graeter's and Fehlbaum's traditional trades, and an expansion from the Graeter and Fehlbaum's native region, that saw Willi and Erika adopt the name 'Vitra' for the new, shared, dominion, a use of the nominative plural of the Latin vitrum, glass, that was a reminder of the display windows of the Graeter, a reminder of the mirrors and lightbulbs of the earliest joint Graeter Fehlbaum house products, a reminder of the work, and teachings, and lessons, of Hanstheo Baumann, and also a committent to the new transparency and openness demanded in the Europe of that age as it moved on from the terrible and debilitating and thoroughly avoidable World Wide War...
...Staged in and by the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig, and tracing its (hi)story back to 1920, the annual Grassimesse is, as oft noted in these dispatches, not only one of the oldest sales fairs devoted to contemporary craft, applied art and design, devoted to promoting discussions and discourses on contemporary craft, applied art and design, but was initiated in context of advancing meaningful, relevant, contemporary craft, applied art and design of a high quality; a task that was important in the 1920s against the background of the earliest attempts at mass industrial production of objects of daily use, and which often produced but tat...
...1 The exhibition Tsuyoshi Tane: The Garden House in the Vitra Design Museum Gallery, and the eponymous Garden House by Tsuyoshi Tane, the latest addition to the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, allow one to approach not only a better appreciation of Tane's positions but also to experience how they influence and inform his approach, his works, his architecture... For all that Vitra is popularly associated with Weil am Rhein, Germany, the company's origins are to be found just across the border in Switzerland, specifically in Birsfelden on the edge of Basel, the association with Weil am Rhein being first forged in the early 1950s, a period when Vitra was still, primarily, a shop-fitting company, if one taking its first, tentative, steps into domestic interiors alongside retail interiors...
