When one thinks of European design capitals, a familiar few come to mind — Milan, Paris, Copenhagen — but some of the most interesting things are happening outside of these established centres. In Berlin, new design festival Currents is attempting to highlight the burgeoning creative scene happening within its city limits, usually better associated with politics and partying rather than a cohesive design culture. From 10 to 12 September, exhibitions from fledgling brands, independent designers and universities popped up across the city, taking over abandoned apartment buildings, industrial spaces and shopfronts in the German capital, offering a snapshot of a scene ready to take on the international stage.
Discover our highlights from Currents
The Bocci Foundry
Currents took place during the annual Berlin Art Week, a sprawling initiative that sees galleries and art institutions stage exhibitions and events throughout the city. So it’s no surprise that many of the exhibitions intermingled with the design fair. The Bocci Foundry, part of the massive Wilhelm Hallen — a former industrial complex turned arts hub on the city’s northern fringes — presented an exhibition bringing together the work of 19 artists and designers from around the world.
Titled The Overview Effect, after the profound shift in perspective experienced by astronauts as they stare back at a pinprick-sized Earth, the exhibition underlined the interconnectedness of humanity, the natural world and the materials that surround us. It featured work from some of the industry’s biggest and most exciting names, including Fernando Laposse, who showed a beechwood table inlaid with colourful heirloom corn husks, a cabinet made from thousands of silkworm cocoons by the French experimental designer Marlène Huissoud and crystallised vases by the German designer Lukas Wegwerth beneath the soaring volumes of the venue’s industrial architecture.
Konstantin Grcic & 25KG
Perhaps Berlin’s best-known designer, Konstantin Grcic has produced hundreds of designs, both well known and less familiar. At his exhibition at the Deutsches Design Museum, he showed off a collection of B-sides from his long and prolific career. Pieces like prototypes, mock-ups, damaged models and unused ideas were accompanied by posters written with tongue-in-cheek aphorisms, as if the viewer were privy to these abandoned pieces of furniture’s sentient interior monologues.
Also included in the show were objects from his erstwhile independent label 25kg, composed of industrial seating inspired by the bollards and scaffolding that populate the Berlin streetscape.
Pascal Hien x Tecta
One of Grcic’s former protégés, Pascal Hien, has been making a name for himself as one of the most promising young product designers coming out of Berlin. Hien gave visitors a work-in-progress preview of his upcoming sofa for Tecta, a compact metal-framed seater, which he plans to launch at the Salone del Mobile in Milan in 2027. Conceived around low-energy production, its simple construction uses replaceable, repairable and recyclable components that can be manufactured using standard machinery rather than costly bespoke tooling. Tecta also brought pieces designed by its stable of Berlin-based designers — including Hanne Willmann, Geckeler Michels and Katrin Greiling — which were arranged in the Jalousiefabrik like a domestic living room.
Find Attached
Also located in the Jalousiefabrik — composed of a former residential apartment building and a somewhat spooky 19th-century blinds factory — was the group show Find Attached. Bringing together 14 young designers, the exhibition explored how design might respond to contemporary social and environmental challenges through objects that ranged from the speculative to the highly practical. Among them, Paul Rees presented Futuristic Objects, including a buoyant armchair designed with flooding in mind and a concrete suitcase that gives physical weight to the carbon cost of air travel, while Marie Kurstjens’ Designing Dignity proposed a menstrual-hygiene kit for displaced women, conceived to function even where clean water is scarce.
Richard Lampert
Stuttgart-based furniture brand Richard Lampert took up residence on the ground floor of a former Postbank branch in a residential apartment block designed by Egon Eiermann to show its collection of furniture by the architect himself. The presentation included archival material documenting Eiermann’s life and work set in dialogue with newly relaunched pieces, adding a layer of context to the historic designs. Among them was an updated version of Eiermann’s E1 table, originally designed in 1953, whose famously pared-back frame has been reworked by designer Tim Schütze with a height-adjustable mechanism.
Re:Lokal glass
The unlikely union of glass and porcelain was among the most intriguing exhibitions of the week. Re:Lokal, located in the historic ring-kiln hall of the Royal Porcelain Manufactory Berlin (KPM), brought together students from HBK Saar and the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin. The result was a collection of experimental pieces made from handcrafted glass, yet using techniques and processes more commonly associated with porcelain production. For instance, Sarah Winter cast molten glass into discarded wooden moulds from the Meisenthal glassworks, preserving the cracks, scorch marks and traces of their previous use in the finished pieces.
Loehr
Homegrown furniture brand Loehr used its Currents exhibition to put a celestial spin on one of its most popular products. The brand partnered with art director Marek Polewski to create 12 special editions of its Jazz chair, each depicting Berlin’s star-filled night sky from a different month of the year. The astrological map was carved into the seat of each chair, so that, when lit from above, the constellation is projected onto the ground below. The effect transforms the chair from a functional object into a kind of astrological instrument, bringing a fragment of Berlin’s changing night sky indoors.