Prof. Hannes Wettstein
Zürich, Switzerland

The Featured Editions at imm cologne, curated by Stylepark together with the trade fair’s team led by Creative Director Dick Spierenburg, offers a marvelous wealth of original ideas.

Moritz Schmid, This Weber and Jörg Boner represent a new generation of Swiss designers, who are beginning to step out from behind the shadows of design heavyweights such as Alfredo Häberli and Hannes Wettstein. A tour of their workshop gives you a great idea of their creative work/output.

Cell offices and cubicles are considered negative examples of office design. The era of what we would today regard as the human office started with the “Citizen Office”. Concepts such as the “Net'n'Nest” symbolize the attempt to combine networking and concentrated work. So will we in future work in a kind of adventure playground for adults?

Ever since the death of its founder Studio Hannes Wettstein has been run by several managing directors. Alongside new projects, the focus is on looking after his estate. Meret Ernst spoke with Simon Husslein about this balancing act.

It is Hannes Wettstein's former desk that is attracting particular attention at the exhibition currently being held at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule – ETH). The found objects and equipment on display there show the Swiss industrial designer, who died in 2008, to have been an inspired and inspiring person. It is definitely a good thing that all of the sum total of 347 projects he is recorded as having made have for the first time been extensively documented in an exhibition and catalog.

Living light can be felt and experienced in various ways - as brightness and darkness, as concentrated rays or as reflections on a wall. Swiss designer Hannes Wettstein speaks in this context of "light semantics". And it was the key factor determining his design for the Scope family of luminaires.