FEATURED New Basel Working World7/1/2014For insurance company Basler Versicherungen Total Office Management developed a flexible office concept. The pilot project features office furniture from the Flow Work System range by Lista Office LO.
ARCHITECTURE Lively, spontaneous, Brazilian6/30/2014The “Lina Bo Bardi: Together” exhibition at Deutsches Architektur Zentrum (DAZ) in Berlin focuses on an architect who came to fame as a passionate champion of subsidized building in Brazil. Yet she remained an outsider at the “Escola Paulista”.
ARCHITECTURE Fast tube to enjoyment6/29/2014Astonishing things are happening on the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein. Anyone climbing Carsten Höller’s “Slide Tower” will find not just an amazing view beckoning, but a slide with a great ride down. Added to which, grand master Álvaro Siza has created a new promenade that offers a novel route round the campus.
ARCHITECTURE Cocoon by fashion patterns6/27/2014Compared to last year’s Serpentine Pavilions, the new one by Chilean architect Smiljan Radić’s is certainly the most astounding and unpredictable yet.
ART Voulez vous Prouvé?6/27/2014At Design Miami, which took place in parallel to Art Basel, the French galleries presented an awful lot of Jean Prouvé originals. The icing on the cake: Konstantin Grcic transformed an Audi TT into a mobile living machine.
FAIRS & EVENTS Charles Brooking’s world of windows6/25/2014So have we simply accepted the fact that nowadays one window looks just like any other?This wonderful collection from England demonstrates just how much variety in window shapes and materials there once was.
FEATURED Scandinavian Dolce Vita6/24/2014Bronda, a restaurant on Eteläesplanadi, a promenade in the center of Helsinki, is both urban and spacious in feel. A high, elongated room with lots of space and a large window front sets a suitable stage for a city-dwelling public in the Finnish capital since this spring. Helsinki architects Futudesign styled the restaurant with timelessly elegant and generous fittings with furniture by Pedrali.
FAIRS & EVENTS Well made and pleasant6/23/2014For “Berlin Design Week”, philosopher Hannes Böhringer, photographer Hans Hansen and designer Axel Kufus invited representatives of a variety of disciplines to a conference to discuss the notion of ‘elegance’. The result: unusual and exciting stimuli for design.
INTERVIEWS Digital Bauhaus6/22/2014Can the idea of the Bauhaus be transposed onto the digital age? This will bethe issue tackled at the “Digital Bauhaus Summit” at the end of June inWeimar. Adeline Seidel interviewed the conference curators Philipp Albers,Holm Friebe, Mads Pankow and Kathrin Passig via the cloud.
FAIRS & EVENTS The dream of an open society6/20/2014The Dutch pavilion celebrates Jaap Bakema and with him the achievements of a form of post-War Modernism whose architecture is shaped by the institutions of the welfare state.
FAIRS & EVENTS Import – Export6/18/2014Modernist architecture as a symbol of emancipation or occupation? Freedom or disenfranchisement? The country contributions from and about African countries provide many an idea in this regard.
FAIRS & EVENTS Modernism and its uncle6/17/2014A fun-loving uncle resides in the French pavilion. He’s called Hulot, was invented by Jacques Tati, and shows in an amusing way all the things that can go wrong in the world of Modernism.
FAIRS & EVENTS A Clockwork Modernism6/17/2014What course did Modernism take in Britain? “Clockwork Jerusalem” takes a glance at William Blake to paint a surprising picture.
FAIRS & EVENTS Please touch6/16/2014A new pragmatism has changed Japanese architecture as if it has bid farewell to dreams – as can be discovered in the Japanese pavilion: “The Real World” is an unusually cluttered exhibition.
FAIRS & EVENTS Germany’s Ex-Top Models6/15/2014In the form of “Bungalow Germania” Alex Lehnerer and Savvas Ciriacidis have created one of the best exhibits in the Biennale and realized an unsettlingly instructive piece on the political instrumentalization of architecture.
FAIRS & EVENTS Architecture Know-How in Museum and Archive6/13/2014A great deal of hard work went into the 14th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. The curators of the national pavilions kindly searched the archives and Rem Koolhaas had all manner of architectural elements brought to the Giardini. A tour of a surprisingly didactic exhibition.
FAIRS & EVENTS Italian affairs6/11/2014For the exhibition “Monditalia” 41 teams were asked to design a piece about the country of Italy. The result: a show that is diverse, chaotic and at times pure kitsch.
FAIRS & EVENTS If you want to understand Modernity you need to have fun with it6/10/2014“Fair Enough” reads the lettering heading the pavilion of the Russian Federation. In other words: Very well! Or could it indeed imply that someone is fed-up with economization? In any case, this pavilion is great fun – while smart and critical at the same time.
FAIRS & EVENTS Rem Koolhaas’ foundations6/10/2014Rem Koolhaas has assembled a marvelous architecture biennial that mines Modernism to uncover its foundations in a bid to address the urgent issues of building in the 21st century.
DESIGN Sun, moon and marble6/9/2014When it comes to designing fragile luminaires that have a minimalist, elegant look-and-feel, Michael Anastassiades, a Cypriot-born designer now living in London, is considered a master in his field. He even succeeds in teasing extraordinary shapes from a solid block of marble.
FAIRS & EVENTS Directly ahead of the Windsors6/8/2014Traditional tools and techniques governed the aesthetic flavor at Clerkenwell Design Week. Young UK companies like Dare Studio, Deadgood, Case and James UK celebrated their British roots and personalities – presenting a breed of truly British future antiques.
ARCHITECTURE Simple city life6/6/2014“Yourtopia” is the name Dutch architects SeARCH have given their pavilion located next to Het Nieuwe Instituut. An urban “Walden” and a call for us to leave our comfort zones.
ARCHITECTURE Resisting fitting the grid6/4/2014“A structure I have always wanted to demolish” was the title of a design assignment that Arno Lederer gave several times at Stuttgart and Karlsruhe universities. Not that the architect had always been hell-bent on tearing down the buildings belonging to the Stuttgarter Hospitalhof complex. Now he has had them demolished after all – and in their place realized a very convincing alternative that exudes nothing but perfection. Almost.
FAIRS & EVENTS Gondola! Gondola!6/3/2014June 7 sees the opening of the 14th Architecture Biennale in Venice. Rem Koolhaas has chosen the basics of building as the main theme, along with “Absorbing Modernity 1914 – 2014”. So whom has gondoliere Rem welcomed on-board for the ride?
INTERVIEWS Mr Hashimoto’s Chou Chou effect6/1/2014Yukio Hashimoto is one of Japan’s top interior designers and imbues hotels, spas and restaurants with a very special look and feel. Martina Metzner met the architect and asked him how he blends tradition with modern aspects, and why restaurants need dramatic lighting effects.
ARCHITECTURE Supercube reloaded5/30/2014The architects at Dutch firm Personal Architecture planned the partial refurbishment of the cube complex that Piet Blom built in 1980s Rotterdam. Now the “Supercubes” have been reintegrated into Rotterdam’s urban fabric and society.
ARCHITECTURE Budapest concrete5/26/2014Budapest’s fourth metro line opened this spring. Hopes of additional urban development projects are associated with this infrastructure project.
INTERVIEWS High density alone is not enough to have a city5/25/2014On the occasion of the fifth annual conference on global urbanism at the Columbia University, New York, Catriona McLaughlin talked to thinker Saskia Sassen about the relation between invisible and visible mobility, the power of open-source-systems and her ongoing research on “urbanizing technology”.
FAIRS & EVENTS Of ants, data donators and Ferris wheels5/23/2014In the Audi-Forum in Ingolstadt the teams in this year’s Audi Urban Future Award allowed the public a first look at their research.
FAIRS & EVENTS Super interfaces and super trains5/21/2014Big Data, sharing systems and super-trains: At the “Mobilities in Cities” conference in New York urban planners, architects and transportation experts met to swap ideas on past, present and future mobility.
ARCHITECTURE The dreamed-up house5/19/2014With the Director’s Villa and the Moholy-Nagy House the ensemble of Gropius’ master houses in Dessau is complete again – and that includes a wall and the Mies van der Rohe kiosk. Repairs, reconstruction or radical reinterpretation, ghastly houses or gesamtkunstwerk, experiment or irritant?
FAIRS & EVENTS Transport, not ecstasy5/18/2014Can a KIA “Picanto” write design history? Is there even any justification for cars’ continued existence in the future? Journalist Niklas Maak, philosopher Martin Gessmann and architect Max Schwitalla sat down in Cologne to discuss the most popular form of auto-motion.
FAIRS & EVENTS On Spokes and Shadows – Spokes by Studio García Cumini for Foscarini5/16/2014Designers Vicente García Jiménez and Cinzia Cumini presented their new magical piece for Foscarini in Milan: A spacious ceiling-mounted luminaire that is thoroughly well conceived technologically speaking, and entrancingly light.