Magazin

The London fair 100% Design might be going through a bad patch but the city itself has a number of interesting things to see in the realm of design, art and architecture.

Design is more than just providing styling, and the look of a car is more than just pretty wraps for it. But do the ad agencies know this, too?

Thomas Demand' works appear to hover in the glass display case that is Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Yet that impression is deceiving, as so foten do his photographs. Under the title "Nationalgalerie" (national gallery) the artist uses curtain fabric hung freely from the ceiling and provided by the Danish company Kvadrat to showcase works whose theme is key moments in German history since 1945.

His designs attest to immense creative powers and are as unusual as is he: Angelo Mangiarotti. What was long since overdue has finally been realized by the provinces of Agape and Mantua: A retrospective in honor of the great Italian designer.

Dare to look into the future? Each of us will drive an electric car, will charge it overnight, while at the same time the washing machine runs because electricity will be cheaper at night. How to secure power supplies during such peak periods? Claudia Beckmann spoke to David Dallinger. They discussed how the electric car of tomorrow can be integrated into renewable decentral energy systems.

The auto's future is inextricably connected to batteries. And to power sockets. What sounds so plausible and developed in the media and at press conferences, is far from ready, and instead the major challenge we face is to develop electromobility: in the form of powerful batteries.

The automobile industry is the focal point of the debate about climate goals and CO2 reduction. The answer to the question about the car of the future is quite clearly electromobility. Claudia Beckmann and Nancy Jehmlich spoke to three experts about which mobility concepts are currently being discussed and the technical and economic challenges that accompany them.

If we are to believe the grandiose announcements by the auto industry we will soon be driving highly efficiently in futuristically designed automobiles into a brave clean world. And the energy will come from a power socket. But a lot of what glitters as promises at IAA is simply not gold. But pie in the sky. And design is tailoring the new clothes and making do with the role of being the sub-servant of technology.

Until September 30, 2009, six renowned architecture studios will be orchestrating in the display windows of the Frankfurt's Vitra showroom imaginative images that drivers waiting at the nearby traffic lights can observe until the light turns green.

Copenhagen is hosting the Code 09 design fair and the Copenhagen Design Week - but it's the city that's the star.

What role is design actually playing at the 63rd IAA car show? Are the new models keeping their promises in this respect? Or for various reasons, is design losing the requisite balance between yesterday and today?

For some time now, the future has been the present as far as automobile advertising is concerned: everything must be green, efficient, economical. Such harmony between Man, Nature and Machine is, however, just a sun-drenched fairy tale, and then, just sometimes, the dim, dark night.

Boxy cars are taking the design world by storm.

Summer is gradually drawing to the close. And with it that summer low point that everyone fears. Among the memories of summer is the 'Architektur Sommer' in Munich, where an innovative new event format took a hold in public spaces.

It's a bit like Christmas, only every other year: Once again this year hordes of amazed and enthusiastic car lovers will make their way to the major car show in Frankfurt, in the hope of finding the wondrous, even revolutionary automobile of the future. But what is it we are actually dreaming of?

What does it actually mean for one's own way of driving, mood, - and not least of all design awareness - to drive along behind a rear, to analyze its motion, get one's own front as close as possible to it, while at the same time, on th other hand, keeping one's one rear as far away as possible from an approaching front?

A real fake - this is the topic addressed in the current issue of Stylepark Magazine for Product Culture. So we dispatched our authors to explore this terrain fraught with tension between reality and illusion, genuine and forgery.

Crisis or no crisis, you will soon be able to oggle them at the IAA International Motor Show in Frankfurt - namely all the new, beautiful, better, faster, even safer and even more fuel-efficient cars. So how does the auto industry present itself in its commercials? What instincts do they appeal to and what values do they propagate?

In that time people have continually been talking about the future of individual transport. There are definitely some alternatives which would help to reduce traffic congestion in big cities and use energy in an efficient way. Intelligently organized group transport is one of them.

Something is brewing, not only in German homes. The interaction between cultures has also grown more intense in the kitchen. Take Poggenpohl: one of the premium German kitchen manufacturers it has been particularly successful in the Gulf Region. We asked why that is and about their experiences there.

Home living magazines announced the "multicultural furniture" trend, the "ethno-style" and "intercultural design" trend. The new color frenzy is being judged as an expression of overcoming a "design style" which is far too plain and of the need for individuality and unconventionality. The world of design seems to have opened up to foreign creative styles.

Be it "I see something you don't see" or "spot the difference", picture puzzles can rouse either our irritation or our ambition. Or be skillfully used in advertising.

The era of the energy-saving lamp has begun. But is it even ready for its new tasks? Many have in recent months warned about the health risks, even environmental associations are sceptical whether the energy savings are great and as regards disposal of the lamp as waste. And with reference to its design, it is not just a matter of taste, but also of drastic consequences for everyday culture and design.

Our era tends to be more backward-looking than future-led. Nonetheless Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's technofacist, imaginative awakening haunts Giardini. Only Tamara Grcic's life rafts help with this.

Martin Margiela is the conceptual thinker of fashion, but one who consciously remains invisible. His oeuvre is more present than ever before on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the existence of Maison Martin Margiela: in the form of exhibitions in Antwerp and Munich, an installation in Milan and a book that is coming out in the fall. It all shows that he pre-empted not only trends in fashion but also in furniture design.

Can art be instrumental in eluding the vicious circle of violence? Not being an officially recognized state, Palestine does not have an official pavilion. Nonetheless, the show "Palestine c/o Venice", demonstrates how diversely and vividly a subtenant can operate.

Gaetano Pesce's sofa design gives you the feeling of lying by a refreshing waterfall high up in the mountains. A piece of furniture with a summer feeling.

A valuable, collectable design object is resplendent on every page. The Zurich Museum of Design presents its collection in a practical, almost square but good book.

Be it outside in the balmy summer air under the large "table" outside the Schirn, or inside enjoying a coffee at one of the small tables with the latest chair designs by Nitzan Cohen and Stefan Diez, or even at the terrazzo bar, or having a meal in a large group, like knights - at the large round table beneath the massive canopy. "Table" offers it all.

It would not let me go. I had to go back there two, three, four times. Back to this work from the glisteningly bright City of Water: "Orbite Rosse", a double video projection in Venice's pitch black Arsenale hall.

Hand-crafted porcelain: obscenely expensive, decorative items for the glass cabinet, figurines ... we know the kind of thing only too well. And then you find yourself taking part in a guided tour round the Nymphenburg porcelain manufactory and you rediscover a world long thought to be forgotten, full of craftsmen who are proud of their work and pieces which breathe life.

In the giardini the spectacle is in full swing. People everywhere and art everywhere. Everything is important and everything clamors for attention. But in the film "Giardini" by Steve McQueen in the Great Britain pavilion, visitors are confronted with a surprisingly different image of the gardens of the Venetian Biennial and of art.

Architectural models usually depict buildings which have not yet been built, in a smaller form. In the Turkish pavilion it is a different story. Here, Ahmet Ögüt displays a model city of houses which no longer exist.

Is Opel now in crisis because its design was not right? What sources of inspiration does a designer draw on? Does good design flourish more in a large enterprise or a family-run business? At an event organized by Mini München in cooperation with bulthaup and Loewe, three discussion rounds addressed these questions.