Hella Jongerius is one of the great designers of her generation. At 62, she doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone, and she doesn’t need to make a name for herself; she’s done that already with her ‘Polder’ and ‘Vlinder’ sofas for Vitra, cabin and seat interiors for KLM, textiles and seating for the UN with Maharam and Galerie Kreo, and porcelain pieces with Nymphenburg, to name just a few projects, not to mention solo shows and installations at the Design Museum, Centre Pompidou, MoMA, Gropius Bau, and the V&A.

But instead of hunkering down, consolidating her reputation and cashing in commercially, Jongerius has decided to divest herself of her extraordinary archive, stop making commercial products and dive deep into new channels of investigation. In 2024, she announced she would be entrusting the bulk of her studio archive to the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, and this will now form the basis of the first retrospective of her work, opening at the museum this spring.

Hella Jongerius: design through investigation and experimentation

Born near Utrecht, Jongerius studied industrial design at Academie voor Industriële Vormgeving (now Design Academy Eindhoven), graduating in 1993 just as Dutch design was beginning to have its big moment. She walked straight out of college and under the umbrella of Droog, the conceptual design company founded that same year by Gijs Bakker and Renny Ramakers. In 1994, Droog exhibited Jongerius’ graduate project, a polyurethane bath mat, in Milan, before going on to produce and distribute it.

Jongerius’ involvement with Droog, she says, was a loose one – ‘we didn’t meet a lot, we saw each other maybe once or twice a year’. But not having to ‘do promotion or find networks’, thanks to them, meant she could concentrate on her studio research. ‘I was the one that was really interested in materials and craft imperfections,’ she says. ‘I was in my own bubble.’ This bubble was the space she used to hone her individual practice, creating soft urns and washtubs in silicone and rubber, purposefully misshapen ceramics, and one-off porcelain pieces that played with production ‘faults’.

Jongerius’ hands-on investigative approach, seeking connections and pathways, was to make her one of the leading figures in a movement taking the focus of design away from the service of commerce and towards research, experiment, concept and craft. Because of her, and others like her, product design taught to students in recent years has become much more about process and much less about product.

Jongerius did not stay with Droog long. After a while, she began taking on assistants and decided her studio needed a name. ‘It wasn’t a big deal,’ she says. ‘I took my own name and added “lab” as a research indicator that fitted, and it still fits.’ JongeriusLab was born, and a series of highly fruitful collaborations followed with brands and galleries alike, from Ikea and Galerie Kreo to Kvadrat and KLM.

Asked about her influences, she names not artists or designers but four company directors she worked with for years: Rolf Fehlbaum at Vitra, Michael Maharam at Maharam, Ingrid Harding at Nymphenburg, and Jan Tichelaar at Royal Tichelaar Makkum. ‘In order to come up with a successful story, or with work that resonates, you need to have a super-good chemistry and social grounding with your client, and you have to grow together,’ she says. ‘They took risks and let me fly, but they also educated me. I’m the one that can think outside the box and ask questions, but they’re the ones who know how the world turns.’

Jongerius believes in serendipity. She counts herself lucky to have met such producers who fostered and shared her success. Such collaborations have also brought her to the understanding that design is less about problem solving and more about relationships with people and objects. ‘Objects interact with your house, with you, and the identity you want to create, but they’re also part of a web of materials that came from somewhere and were made by somebody.’

She has recently strengthened this connected approach by adapting her studio so that visiting designers can sleep over or stay the weekend. This means she can ‘invite people with other heads and other hands, from other cultures’ so they can eat together and interact socially, as well as work and think about projects. In this way, the sterility of the lab perhaps becomes much more about domestic warmth, facilitating the sociological weave that is already so apparent in her textile work.

That is not to say that Jongerius doesn’t have a clear understanding of all the tools at her disposal, social and material. She is perfectly aware of how to manipulate colour, form and material to beguile and create desire in the consumer. ‘Colour is just a material,’ she notes. ‘It is just a tool that brings beauty; it makes you care. If something is beautiful, then it resonates and you open yourself up to it when you look at it or if you use it. You take care of it and you repair it if it gets damaged.’

Over the last few years, Jongerius has begun working with clay in a really visceral and artistic way, ‘taking the time to get lost’ – though, as she is quick to insist, ‘I am not an artist’. After her 2021 ‘Woven Cosmos’ exhibition at the Gropius Bau in Berlin, which focused on the healing function of objects, she realised she hadn’t produced any animal figures for a while, not since her Nymphenburg animal bowls in 2004, her wall hanging project for Ikea in 2009, and her animal mirrors and ‘Frog’ table for Galerie Kreo in 2007 and 2009, respectively, and that she needed them again in this current context. So she got deeply involved in clays and glazes for a while, materials she hadn’t worked with for years and then surprised herself with how angry their faces turned out. ‘I made these half-product, half-animals. They were all really angry and I was like, “Oh my god!”’

She says she felt empowered by her ‘Angry Animals’ series, first shown at Salon 94 Design in New York in 2024, and later at Galerie Kreo, and the joy that the knowledge to make such things still lay in her hands. She acknowledges where the anger comes from, and she continues to make them because ‘they express where we are in the world’. They all have women’s names, she says, ‘because we have every reason to be angry with the bullies of this world and the setbacks to the position of women’.

Her angriest piece yet, she says, is in production right now: a ceramic shark-infested pond, complete with a fountain, due to be installed on the Vitra museum’s front lawn in time for Art Basel. Being angry is a privilege of getting older, says Jongerius, and she acknowledges that, thanks to the position she now has as a designer, she has nothing to lose – particularly as major collections of her work are now safely housed in the V&A, MoMA, Pinakothek, Centre Pompidou and TextielMuseum, as well as Vitra. ‘I also feel that it is my responsibility to speak out and be a role model for others. That’s the freedom you have when you don’t work in a system any longer. You can speak out and speak loud.’ We can’t wait to hear what she will say next.

‘Hella Jongerius: Whispering Things’ is on show from 14 March until 6 September 2026 at Vitra Design Museum, design-museum.de

There’s a sense that we’re tiring of design taking itself quite so seriously. Recent fairs and launches suggest a palpable pushback against the algorithmic sameness of pixel-perfect, beige interiors, alongside a renewed appetite for decoration that’s playful, satirical and a little subversive. It makes this year’s Verner Panton centenary feel perfectly timed. Best known for his exuberant use of colour and pattern, and for swooping, futuristic forms, Panton approached interiors as complete environments: spaces to inhabit, not simply admire.

'The main purpose of my work is to provoke people into using their imagination,' said Panton. 'Most people spend their lives in dreary, grey-beige conformity, mortally afraid of using colours. By experimenting with lighting, colours, textiles and furniture and utilizing the latest technologies, I try to show new ways to encourage people to use their phantasy and make their surroundings more exciting.'

The centenary is being marked in 2026 by a major exhibition and year-long programme of events at the Vitra Design Museum in collaboration with Verner Panton Design AG. But it also feels like a timely reminder of just how radical – and how unapologetically fun – Panton’s vision really was. Long before ‘immersive’ became a marketing buzzword, he was building total environments: rooms where colour, light, furniture and textiles fused into a single sensorial experience, designed to be lived in as much as looked at. Here's everything you need to know about this design legend.

Who was Verner Panton?

Born on the Danish island of Funen in 1926, Panton trained as an architect at Copenhagen’s Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, coming of age in a culture that revered restraint. Even then, he was drawn less to Danish modernism’s quiet discipline than to the new possibilities emerging through industry: moulded plastics, synthetic textiles, mass production.

In the early 1950s he worked briefly in the studio of Arne Jacobsen (who became a lifelong friend and mentor), contributing to the era’s defining experiments in furniture – but his own instincts were already pulling him in a different, altogether more animated direction.

Verner Panton, Key Projects

Kom Igen restaurant

Panton's breakthrough came not through a showroom, but a restaurant. In 1958, Panton was asked by his father to redesign and extend the family inn, Kom Igen. It was an early glimpse of what would become his modus operandi: a project approached not as an interior, but as a complete world.

The result was theatrical and all-encompassing. Drenched in five shades of red, it encompassed lighting, textiles, furniture and graphics. Among the pieces developed for the project was the Cone Chair, an inverted upholstered funnel perched on a slender base: a design that signalled his emerging language of geometry, sensuality and provocation. The chair caught the eye of Percy von Halling-Koch, who established the company Plus-linje in order to put it into production. Soon after came the Heart Cone Chair, and a whole series of cone-shaped furniture.

The Panton chair

If Kom Igen was the start of Panton’s world-building, the Panton chair would become his emblem. In 1956, he produced an earlier S-shaped bent plywood design – the S Chair – for German manufacturer Thonet. Over the following decade, Panton continued refining the concept, eventually realising it for serial production in collaboration with Vitra, which launched the Panton Chair in 1967. A single, continuous S-curve, moulded in one piece, it was a technical feat as much as a piece of furniture – and one that quickly came to symbolise a new era of design optimism. It was also a landmark for Vitra itself: the first product the company developed independently, born from a partnership willing to embrace risk, time and industrial trial-and-error.

Visiona

Panton's true ambition lay not in isolated objects, but in atmospheres – environments where furniture became part of a larger landscape. That approach reached its fullest expression in Visiona, the series of experimental interiors he created on a Rhine excursion steamer in 1968 and 1970 during the annual Cologne furniture fair. Commissioned by Bayer as a showcase for the company’s latest synthetic materials, the exhibitions felt like alternate realities: saturated landscapes of colour, soft sculptural forms and synthetic surfaces, where visitors could lounge, recline and drift through light.

The most famous of these installations, 'Fantasy Landscape' (Part of the Visiona II, 1970), remains one of the 20th century’s defining statements on interior as experience – a psychedelic topography of upholstered forms that blurred floor, wall and ceiling into a continuous domestic terrain. It encapsulated Panton’s belief that design should be felt physically, not merely appreciated intellectually: an insistence that the home could be a space of play, sensuality and even escapism. Vitra, among other licensees of Verner Panton Design AG, continues to produce designs developed for Visiona, including Amoebe seating and the Living Tower, a vertical upholstered structure that turns furniture into a kind of inhabitable sculpture.

Der Spiegel Headquarters

From there, Panton’s work moved into an unlikely arena: the corporate office. In 1969, he was invited to redesign the Hamburg headquarters of Der Spiegel. The brief demanded seriousness and dignity, but Panton delivered something far stranger and more ambitious – a total interior of integrated lighting, coloured panels, reflective surfaces and boldly zoned floors, including an otherworldly fitness facility and swimming pool. It was a reminder that his approach was not merely decorative, but psychological: colour as a tool to shape behaviour, mood and attention.

‘Choosing colours should not be a gamble,’ he once said. ‘It should be a conscious decision. Colours have a meaning and a function.’ Even comfort, for Panton, was inseparable from atmosphere: ‘One sits more comfortably on a colour that one likes.’

Restaurant Varna

A similar spirit animated his redesign of Restaurant Varna in Aarhus in the early 1970s, another landmark in his lifelong pursuit of the gesamtkunstwerk – the total work of art. Here again, Panton treated interiors as a kind of immersive theatre, layering textiles, lighting and furniture into a choreographed whole. The aim was not subtlety but transformation: to walk through the door was to enter a new world.

Private House at Binningen

That world was not limited to public commissions. In Basel, where Panton settled in the 1960s, his Binningen townhouse became a living laboratory for his ideas – a domestic environment that doubled as a showroom, blurring daily life with design experiment.

His daughter, Carin Panton von Halem, has described growing up ‘inside a world of colour and imagination’, in a house that felt like ‘its own universe… an unusual landscape of forms, colours, lights and unexpected details.’ As a child, she recalls, it was ‘the perfect playground, a place where your imagination could roam freely and where creativity felt as natural as breathing.’

Death and legacy

Panton passed away following a heart attack in 1998, aged 72. By then, he had partly returned to Denmark, having spent much of his career based in Switzerland, and was preparing to open the first major retrospective of his work, 'Verner Panton: Light and Colour,' at Trapholt Museum in Kolding, Denmark.

It is perhaps the sense of imaginative freedom that best defines Panton's enduring appeal. His work was futuristic, certainly, but never cold. It emerged from the postwar decades of optimism and experimentation, but it continues to speak to the present because it offers something increasingly rare. In an era of visual fatigue and algorithmic repetition, his interiors are a reminder that design can still be mischievous, immersive and unapologetically fun.

Shop Verner Panton's most famous designs

2026 is shaping up to be an exciting year for design lovers, with an array of global design exhibitions set to be staged at some of the world's most celebrated institutions. Our exhibition calendar includes retrospectives of design legends, from Verner Panton to Lella and Massimo Vignelli, and in-depth looks at the work of giants such as Isamu Noguchi and Alessandro Mendini.

We also can’t wait to delve deeper into the archives of some of our favourite grandes dames of design, with shows dedicated to Hella Jongerius, Es Devlin and Sabine Marcelis.

Below are the institutional exhibitions we are most looking forward to – mark your diaries, and don’t miss our 2026 design fairs calendar too.

2026 design exhibitions to discover

‘Fungi: Anarchist Designers’ at Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam

This groundbreaking design exhibition curated by anthropologist Anna Tsing and designer Feifei Zhou presents fungi as 'radical designers in a world beyond human control'. On view at Rotterdam's Het Nieuwe Instituut, the display explores how mushrooms and moulds can cause decomposition, death and destruction, but also explores their potential to work together with human and non-human life. The curator commissioned seven new installations for the exhibition, created by designers working closely with scientists, and also includes artworks from artists such as Olafur Eliasson and Annicka Yi. The thought-provoking exhibition aims to challenge our perception of design while answering the question, what can we learn from non-human life?

Until 8 August 2026, Nieuwe Instituut, Museumpark 25, 3015 CB Rotterdam

Alessandro Mendini at Estorick Collection, London

The first solo exhibition of Alessandro Mendini’s work in the UK, this show features a curation of over 50 pieces, ranging from furniture and drawings to paintings, rugs and objects. The playful poetry of Mendini's work is explored through the artistic references and inspirations that helped shape his career. Among the connections woven by the exhibition are those with Futurist artist Fortunato Depero, to whom the designer dedicated two works in fabric, and Wassily Kandinsky’s abstract paintings, referenced in Mendini's Kandissi sofa.

16 January – 10 May 2026, Estorick Collection, 39a Canonbury Square, London N1 2AN

‘Noguchi’s New York’ at The Noguchi Museum

Isamu Noguchi first arrived in New York City in 1922 and, despite his globe-spanning career in art and design, the city remained a base for him throughout his life – and its material, cultural, social and political landscapes a profound influence on his ideas and work. In turn, Noguchi left his own mark on the city – with public art proposals and communal spaces designed for engagement and play (many of which faced opposition from figures such as NYC Parks Commissioner Robert Moses). Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the inauguration of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, this exhibition examines Noguchi’s enduring efforts to give back to the city that inspired him. It also celebrates the museum itself as one of his most lasting contributions to New York, highlighting the dialogue between art and surroundings that defined Noguchi’s vision and legacy.

4 February – 5 July 2026, The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York

‘Art of Noise’ at Cooper Hewitt, New York

This major exhibition examines how design has shaped the way we experience music over the last century. From concert posters and album covers to the design of radios, phonographs, digital players and sound systems, ‘Art of Noise’ brings together over 300 objects from the collections of Cooper Hewitt and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to reveal how designers have influenced our relationship with sound. The exhibition also features dynamic audio environments by Stockholm-based Teenage Engineering and multidisciplinary artist Devon Turnbull, inviting visitors to engage with sound and design in entirely new ways – from custom listening rooms to innovative seating environments – showing how visual and industrial practices both reflect and shape cultural, technological and social shifts in music.

13 February – 19 July 2026, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York

‘Hella Jongerius: Whispering Things’ at Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein

The first retrospective of Hella Jongerius’ work, this exhibition follows the Vitra Design Museum's acquisition of her archives and charts the Dutch designer's creative trajectory across several disciplines, including textiles, ceramics, furniture, lighting, and sculpture. Alongside the archives will be an overview of Jongeriuslab, the designer's studio, and its unique approach to creativity, shaped by a mix of 'layering ideas, drawing connections, emphasising materiality, exposing process, and researching deeply, with a dedication to craft, colour, and cosmic thinking'.

14 March – 6 September 2026, Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany

‘Lella and Massimo Vignelli’ at Triennale Milano

A major retrospective dedicated to the work of Lella and Massimo Vignelli, this exhibition is a testament to the designers’ crucial impact on popular culture through product design and visual communications. The Vignellis left post-war Milan and settled in New York to establish their studio in 1965, and their ‘intellectual and human journey’ is narrated through a curated selection of objects, furniture, interiors, drawings, models, sketches, photographs, manuals, trademarks, books, covers, and magazines. The exhibition is designed by Jasper Morrison, and created with the support of the Vignelli Center for Design Studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology (USA), which preserves more than 750,000 objects from the studio's history.

25 March – 6 September 2026, Triennale Milano, Viale Alemagna 6, Milan

‘Verner Panton: Form, Colour, Space’ at Vitra Schaudepot, Weil am Rhein

It’s no exaggeration to say that Danish architect and designer Verner Panton (1926-1998) transformed furniture, interiors, fabrics, lamps and buildings with his bold forms, vibrant colours and visionary ideas. In 2026, he would have celebrated his 100th birthday; to mark the occasion, the Vitra Design Museum’s Schaudepot exhibition – one of the most significant collections of Panton’s designs – is presenting his work chronologically and thematically. The exhibition highlights iconic pieces such as the ‘Panton’ chair and the 1970 ‘Visiona II’ installation; it also reconstructs the designer’s 1970 ‘Fantasy Landscape’, a walk-in environment that transformed the way people experienced space, colour and form. The exhibition places Panton’s work in its historical context, examining his innovations in materials and production, the postwar social shifts that shaped his designs, and the influence of the Space Age.

23 May 2026 – 9 May 2027, Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany

Es Devlin at the Design Museum, London

This is the first major UK survey of Es Devlin’s 30-year career, showcasing her work across sculpture, performance and light installations. Operating at the intersection of art, performance, architecture and technology, Devlin is known for elevating stage design to an art form. Her work treats audiences as ‘temporary societies’ – rather than serving as a backdrop, it shapes how people gather, move and feel within a space, whether that’s through kinetic stage sculptures for artists like Beyoncé, U2 and The Weeknd, or monumental installations for events such as the Olympic ceremonies and Super Bowl halftime show. Developed in close collaboration with Devlin, this retrospective features rare maquettes, sketches, annotated texts and process materials alongside new sculptures and installations created specifically for the exhibition, highlighting her transformative influence on contemporary art and design while revealing the ideas and processes behind her most ambitious work.

18 September 2026 – 11 April 2027, Design Museum, London

‘Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley’ at Blanton Museum, Austin, Texas

In the 15 years since establishing their design studio, twin brothers Nikolai and Simon Haas have crafted a world filled with magical creatures and larger-than-life biomorphic ideas that also happen to be brilliant design objects. This exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art explores the Austin natives' magical output; discover sculptural objects made in a variety of techniques and materials, including porcelain, bronze, wool, glass beads, fur, and more.

26 September 2026 – 17 January 2027, Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, 200 E Martin Luther King Jr Blvd

‘Sabine Marcelis – Light and Color’ at Museum für Gestaltung Zürich

Sabine Marcelis’ first museum exhibition is dedicated to the Dutch designer’s impeccable colour and light work, exploring the past few years' output alongside newly commissioned light pieces. On view at Zürich's Museum für Gestaltung, the show presents an insight into Marcelis' practice, with samples and material studies offering a look behind the scenes of her work, combined with a carefully conceived spatial experience that honours her expressive designs.

30 October 2026 – 14 March 2027, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Pfingstweidstrasse 96

‘The Nue Black Aesthetic’ at the Design Museum, London

This landmark exhibition highlights contemporary Black designers who are reshaping the British and global design landscape. Ambitious and wide-ranging, it encompasses furniture, architecture, fashion and installation. The featured designers, including the likes of Mac Collins, Samuel Ross, Bianca Saunders and Giles Tettey Nartey, draw on identity, culture and community to create work that reflects the complexities of modern Black experience. The exhibition situates this work within a broader historical context, referencing movements such as the Black Aesthetic of the 1960s and the New Black Aesthetic of the 1980s, while interpreting these legacies for today’s landscape. ‘The Nue Black Aesthetic’ reveals the transformative ways Black designers are shaping design, as well as inviting audiences to rethink entrenched narratives about who defines it.

6 November 2026 – 8 August 2027, Design Museum, London

When the eminent fashion historian Caroline Evans writes about the roots of the fashion show in The Mechanical Smile (2013), she leaves us in the year of the Great Crash. By 1930, she suggests, all the conventions were set: ‘Some men and women come into a room, they walk up and down and they exit. Other men and women look at them. This goes on for decades…’ A newly opened exhibition at Vitra Design Museum titled ‘Catwalk: The Art of the Fashion Show’ guides us from the silent Paris salon right up to the raucous digital spectacle of the present day, offering a view of both permanence and permutation.

Curated by Jochen Eisenbrand and Katharina Krawczyk with Kirsty Hassard and Svetlana Panova of V&A Dundee, ‘Catwalk’ is the first exhibition the museum has ever dedicated to fashion. It opens with the birth of the show around 1900. Photographs, illustrations, films, objects and printed matter reveal the way designers communicated their collections up until the Second World War. A Pathé reel from 1928 offers a glimpse into the vista of the House of Worth: models walk through a succession of doorways inside a hôtel particulier, swinging open their coats for seated, chatting clients. By 1967, a gaggle of jiving models are showing off Mary Quant’s latest designs inside a happening Hamburg art gallery. Nearby, William Klein’s fantastic 1966 parody of a Paris fashion show set inside a sculpted building by André Bloc is blown up on the wall.

‘Catwalk: The Art of the Fashion Show’ at Vitra Design Museum, Basel

Since the rise of prêt-à-porter in the 1960s, fashion – and all that surrounds it – became defined as a kind of entertainment. ‘Fashion shows are image machines,’ Eisenbrand says. ‘They are important because of the images that they create.’

A section of the exhibition focuses on a predilection for shows on a colossal scale. Spectacles from the early 2000s circulate online today, mediated by a generation of digital archivists captivated by the glittering kinship between art and commerce. Karl Lagerfeld was fearless in this. Throughout his 36-year tenure at Chanel, he tickled at the edges between trade show, pop performance and camp theatre. For A/W 2014, he staged Chanel’s ready-to-wear show inside a giant makeshift supermarket filled with Chanel-branded fabric conditioner, milk and bread. Models vaulted down the aisles filling leather and chain baskets with branded goods. A perfectly rendered architectural model of the scenography – with its miniature checkout tills, gondolas and tiny hams – has been loaned by the Chanel archives and is on display for the very first time.

Co-curator Krawczyk says that ‘Catwalk’ is based on the idea that the fashion show is a multi-disciplinary design concept. As a student living in Paris in the early 2000s she snuck into Alexander McQueen’s S/S 2005 show, which was staged as a giant game of chess. ‘Oh my god, I will not forget that. I got in at the last second after I followed somebody who had an invitation, I was like, “I'm his assistant!” You can see me in the video, sitting on the floor in the first row, super happy with my little camera,’ she says. ‘It was amazing because the show was super simple in the beginning, and with McQueen the finales were always the thing. The models started to walk and then line up in rows. Then all of a sudden, they stopped and started to move as if they were chess pieces playing a game. Everybody got goosebumps. You didn’t know where the drama was going.’

A growing interest in looking beyond the fashion image and exploring the ephemera, magazines, brochures, invitations and flyers is also a red thread in the exhibition. It looks around the clothes. ‘My early memories of fashion have something to do with Cindy Crawford, I’m sure,’ says Eisenbrand. ‘The 1990s was when fashion went into pop culture and even though I was not a passionate follower, my first “show” might have been MTV’s House of Style. It may have also been George Michael’s music video for Freedom. I never followed the shows, but they came through to me on this mediated level.’

The curators all agreed that the final room needed to reflect on the last five years. During the pandemic many hoped that the industry might change the seasonal ritual of in person fashion weeks for good, yet it was business as usual once the restrictions were lifted. The ceremonial 10-minute feast of models walking up and down underneath the bright lights proved all too seductive to forgo altogether. A number of architectural models produced by OMA for Prada over their 25-year collaboration are on display too. For A/W 2021 they created a show-set made up of textured rooms which was live streamed online. ‘It was sensual, even though the viewers could not be present,’ Eisenbrand says.

The conventions of the fashion show, how they operate and what they might feel like to anyone watching hasn’t changed, but the breadth of their audiences has. They now attract people that are drawn to them as events in themselves, people interested in a brief moment in the stories they see played out on the stage.

Projected onto the wall is the model Shalom Harlow sprayed in a jet of black and yellow paint by two curious machines at McQueen’s S/S 1999 show. It still commands – and demands – our attention. More recently Demna’s partnership with the Berlin-based architecture office Sub for Balenciaga has contributed a number of staggeringly affecting shows to the canon of the 21^st century – hundreds of images and minutes of film as layered and as rich as any other theatrical medium. ‘I think it needs to be this today because through these kinds of shows, we learn so much about where we are in society,’ Krawczyk concludes. ‘A jacket doesn't need a fashion show, but the show offers another layer of the story.’

Catwalk: The Art of the Fashion Show at Vitra Design Museum, 18 October 2025 – 15 February 2026 and opening at V&A Dundee 3 April – 17 January 2027.

The Shakers: A World in the Making

On 7 June 2025, the Vitra Design Museum in Germany will launch ‘The Shakers: A World in the Making’, which will run until 28 September. The exhibition will explore the enduring influence of the Shakers, a Protestant sect that originated in England in the mid-1700s, its members emigrating to the American colonies in 1774.

‘The Shakers: A World in the Making’, with an exhibition design by Milan-based studio Formafantasma (a winner at Wallpaper's 2025 Design Awards), will bring together over 150 original Shaker artefacts, as well as newly commissioned works by contemporary artists and designers, creating a dialogue between history and modern creativity.

One of the exhibition’s four sections, titled ‘I Don’t Want to be Remembered as a Chair’, argues that Shaker design should not be appreciated purely for its aesthetics but through the lens of the group’s religious and communal philosophy. Thus, ‘The Shakers: A World in the Making’ will examine how these values became a wellspring of inspiration for modern designers, and how the Shakers’ legacy continues to resonate in art and design today.

Today, ‘Shaker style’ has come to mean a number of things: design that is simple, minimalist and democratic; functional, practical and optimised; and that prioritises craftsmanship and, later, technology. Below, we explore how these principles are manifested in key 20th-century movements such as modernism and Bauhaus, which find their roots in the Shakers’ way of life.

How Shaker principles have informed modern design

Simplicity, minimalism and democratic design

The Shakers were, in many ways, ahead of their time, espousing egalitarian ideals and even institutionalising gender equality in the 1780s. These values extended to those with physical disabilities. The Shakers’ inclusive philosophy, explored in the exhibition through the work of artist Finnegan Shannon, was reflected in their architecture and design, which prioritised accessibility and simplicity – design for all, not just the elite.

This laid the groundwork for modernism, which emerged in the early 20th century as a reaction against the ornate styles of Victorian and art nouveau. Modernist designers preferred clean lines and rejected unnecessary decoration, intending for their work to be applicable across cultures and contexts. The likes of Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto and Charles and Ray Eames admired Shaker principles.

Bauhaus, which emerged in 1919, adopted similar ideals, with its clean lines and geometric shapes, avoiding ornamentation. Scandinavian design, too, bears the hallmarks of Shaker design, with its uncluttered, streamlined look (think Danish designer Hans Wegner’s iconic ‘Wishbone’ chair, as seen in this Swiss chalet, which has distinct echoes of Shaker seating). It also follows democratic ideals, aiming to create high-quality design for the many, distilled in the business model of Swedish stalwart Ikea.

Functionality, practicality and spatial optimisation

The importance that the Shakers placed on labour translated into designs that were functional: think ladder-back chairs, straight-legged tables, built-in cupboards, and efficient storage solutions such as wall-mounted rails, boxes and baskets. The Shakers were early adopters of serial furniture production; in the exhibition, in the section titled ‘When We Find a Good Thing, We Stick To It’, audiences can see examples of standardised and customisable Shaker chairs.

This element of Shaker design can be felt in Bauhaus, where decorative elements were minimised unless they served a function, and Scandinavian design, which seeks to create beauty from utility. Modernism sought to create efficient spaces and objects for modern life; the idea underpinning the ‘Eames Molded Plywood Chair’, for example, was that every element served a purpose. Modernism’s layouts, meanwhile, often used an optimised grid system.

‘The Shakers: A World in the Making’ uses furniture such as cabinets, chests of drawers and sewing desks to illustrate the community’s instinct towards orderliness, as codified in their 1821 and 1845 Millennial Laws, a body of teachings covering a wide range of aspects of Shaker life, including behaviour, dress and even how to climb stairs.

Craftsmanship, natural materials and openness to technology

The Shakers had a strong work ethic, which also translated into a focus on craftsmanship. In ‘I Don’t Want to be Remembered as a Chair’, the Shaker belief in labour as a form of worship is reinterpreted by artist and designer Chris Halstrøm through a large-scale embroidered artwork where each stitch is represented as a prayer.

The group’s emphasis on handmade quality resonated with the Arts and Crafts movements which took off in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and valued natural materials, simple joinery and built-to-last construction. The idea is also felt in Scandinavian design, where quality is paramount; this movement also, like the Shakers, favours organic materials such as wood, leather, linen, and stone.

Despite their insular communities, the Shakers were open to outside influences. The exhibition’s ‘Every Force Evolves a Form’ section traces how they interacted with the advancements of the wider world, showcasing oval boxes and rudimentary power tools. In ‘The Place Just Right’, audiences can see a radio that belonged to the Shaker community in Canterbury, Connecticut, as well as musical artefacts such as a metronome (music was a big part of Shaker life; they gained their moniker through the worshipful dance for which they were known). Shaker innovation is also explored through a commission from Christien Meindertsma, who reimagines their basketry as a biodegradable coffin.

Like the Shakers, later design movements such as modernism and Bauhaus embraced technological progress, especially industrial production, as a means of improving everyday life.

Full exhibition details at vitradesignmuseum.de

Roughly 48 hours after British athlete Keely Hodgkinson secured her first Olympic victory, in the women’s 800m final at Paris 2024, Nike was already celebrating in full bloom at its London flagship store, Nike Town, on buzzy Oxford Street. I witnessed it firsthand: a glass vitrine paraded a replica of Hodgkinson’s winning sneaker (signed by herself), complete with the time stamp of her gold-worthy race and an aerial shot of the finish line – let’s not forget the sprawling red and black LED screen column reminding us that ‘all-time greats don’t stop at gold’.

Are we even surprised? Of course not. Nike is both the master and student when it comes to its unrelenting encouragement to ‘Just do it’. Over the past 50 years, the sportswear giant’s evolutionary and revolutionary creative telescope rests in a simple truth: ‘to invite everybody – and every body – to experience sport for themselves’. For the grassroots startup turned global phenomenon (valued at just under 30 billion USD as of 2024), if you have a body, then you’re an athlete, and it’s via an unwavering commitment to design that the brand embraces the endless pursuit of athletic betterment in all its forms; no garment or sneaker comes out from pure instinct.

From the battered Air Force 1 kicks most teenagers wear to school to the Nike Zoom Victory 2 silhouette in which Hodgkinson won Olympic gold, every Nike product arises from years of ‘tinkering, adjusting, testing and refining’. As cited in the company’s 2023 design manifesto, No Finish Line: ‘Each successive product charts a new point on a never-ending journey forward.’ This was the ethos its co-founder and University of Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman pushed forward from the early days – he notably developed the label’s fabled Waffle sole using a kitchen iron at home.

Tour ‘Nike: Form Follows Motion’ at the Vitra Design Museum

Across technology, performance, sports and pop culture, Nike’s presence is so ubiquitous that the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, hosting the first major exhibition dedicated to the American behemoth may come as a surprise. Mateo Kries, director of the Vitra Design Museum, tells Wallpaper*: ‘It is a general phenomenon that design topics have taken very long to enter the museum world. During the past decade, there have been major exhibitions about some leading fashion houses, but to make an exhibition about a brand like Nike is yet another level. The brand’s design archive is an incredible treasure trove; we were lucky to come across it.’

‘Nike: Form Follows Motion’ traces five decades of the brand’s culture of design and innovation through the lens of athletes, designers, scientists and the wider community, with examples sourced from the Nike Design Archive (DNA), which consists of over 200,000 samples. As Kries emphasises: ‘There is not such a big difference between Nasa engineer Frank Rudy, who developed the original Air technology for more than a decade, and an athlete wearing Nike: both are pursuing a dream with great energy and determination.’ Of course, the question of what makes Nike Nike doesn’t have a straightforward answer, which is why the exhibition follows four chronological sections. The first, ‘Track’, delves into the brand archive’s earliest holdings: from hands-on marketing campaigns to early-day stories.

It was 1972 when American graphic designer Carolyn Davidson developed the Swoosh for Nike’s co-founders Phil Knight and Bowerman – today, one of the most recognisable logos in the world. Kries smiles at the idea that the logo itself could be the topic of a whole new exhibition: ‘It is one of the first logos that is purely abstract, which means not derived from any word or any figurative image (like an apple).’ A paragon of design perfection, the two overlaid curves with an elegant tip showing upwards elegantly express the idea of speed and movement. ‘It is also remarkable that the logo has remained unchanged over several decades, which is rare in our world of accelerated trends and images.’

Glenn Adamson, curator of the exhibition and curator-at-large at the Vitra Design Museum, recounts a story from Nike’s early days: the Tennessee State Tigerbelles, a record-breaking relay team from a historically Black university that Nike endorsed in the 1970s: ‘The four runners – Deborah Jones, Brenda Morehead, Chandra Cheeseborough and Ernestine Davis – set a world record in the indoor 880 relay in 1978; this was an emblematic moment in the Civil Rights era and a precursor to the better-known relationships that Nike would develop with Black athletes in the 1980s and later.’

From its beginnings in the track-and-field scene, the company evolved into a national and, eventually, global powerhouse. The exhibition’s second chapter, ‘Air’, highlights the transformative 1980s when Nike truly took flight, propelled by strategic sponsorships of athletes across various sports. A pivotal moment came in 1984 with the launch of the first Air Jordan shoe, created for rookie Michael Jordan during his time with the Chicago Bulls, marking Nike’s entry into the basketball arena. This success paved the way for expansion into other categories like tennis, global football and skateboarding. The legendary Air Max 1 – for which in-house designer Tinker Hatfield got inspiration from Paris’ Centre Pompidou – also emerged during this era, ushering in a new chapter in the company’s design legacy.

The third space, ‘Sensation’, delves into the research and development that shapes Nike’s design culture, highlighting the Nike Sport Research Lab in Beaverton, Oregon. Founded in 1980, this facility is among the largest and most advanced in the world for studying human movement, with many of its findings directly influencing the products we see on shelves. Adamson explains, ‘There, it’s not just about the feel of the materials or structure –though that’s certainly important – but also how a shoe or garment responds to athletes of varying body types, skill levels and needs.’ The exhibition looks at examples, such as the Alphafly series, engineered to break the two-hour marathon barrier, a feat ultimately achieved by Eliud Kipchoge, or the process behind shoes tailored for elite athletes like LeBron James, exemplifying a highly detailed ergonomic approach to design development.

Nike’s design for sustainability is also touched upon, an integral component of the Swoosh’s creative process since the early 2000s. A topic often scrutinised, Kries notes the ambition for the exhibition was to give clear examples of green initiatives and inventions at Nike: ‘We present facts and examples to demonstrate the serious research and work behind Nike. Ultimately, it’s up to the audience to decide.’ This approach allows visitors to explore the brand’s composite material, Grind, made from the soles of old sneakers, and discover Flyknit technology, a digital knitting method that significantly reduces waste during production – most notably seen in the ISPA Link Axis silhouette.

The final chapter, ‘Relation’, acts as a fitting coda that encapsulates the essence of the Nike universe: exploring collaborations with a diverse array of external designers (think Marc Newson, Comme des Garçons and Virgil Abloh), athletes, musicians and other community-based initiatives that reflect the brand’s influential role in both popular and counter cultures. Reflecting on pivotal moments, Adamson recalls when American soccer player Brandi Chastain unveiled a Nike-developed sports bra during her 1999 championship celebration: ‘This was an encouragement for many women to request sports equipment adapted to their specific needs.’

For the sneakerheads eager to explore footwear rarities up close, Adamson promises two sections sure to captivate, including a prototype of the aforementioned Bowerman’s Waffle trainer. ‘These objects rarely leave the Nike campus, if ever, so having them in the exhibition is such an exciting opportunity.’ It’s the final room that heralds some never-before-seen highlights, such as a special never-released edition Air Force 1 designed to accompany American rapper Nelly’s 2002 album ‘Nellyville’; a 2018 Air Span created as a tribute to British blogger Gary Warnett (with only 40 pairs made); and shoes made back in 1982 for Elton John and Donna Summer.

‘Nike: Form Follows Motion’ will be on display at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany until 4 May 2025, and it’s set to travel to other international museums in the future. For more information, visit design-museum.de

Vitra’s sprawling, architecturally diverse campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany, makes an appropriate setting for this new exhibition, ‘Science Fiction Design: From Space Age to Metaverse’. Tapping into our perennial preoccupation with the shape of the future, ‘Science Fiction Design’ explores the synergy between furniture design and the environments of tomorrow created by artists and production designers.

Curated by Susanne Graner and Nina Steinmüller, the exhibition features over 100 objects, many of which will be familiar from cameo appearances in everything from Star Trek to 2001: A Space Odyssey to Blade Runner, together with contemporary furniture pieces that are setting the agenda for future visions.

‘Science Fiction Design: From Space Age to Metaverse’ at Vitra Design Museum

Argentine visual artist and designer Andrés Reisinger has created the suitably pared-back installation, presenting a host of chairs and other design objects as if they were pieces of high-tech equipment, in a minimal grey framework complete with frosted glass and mirrors that could have come straight from the set of a Kubrick film.

Shown alongside the objects are excerpts from key pieces of science fiction film and literature, placing some of these in context and showing the dialogue and tension between designers creating for the modern age and the set dresser in search of something avant-garde and potentially out of this world.

In addition to familiar screen icons like Olivier Mourgue’s ‘Djinn’ seating from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Marc Newson’s ‘Orgone’ chair from Prometheus (2012), there are also explicitly space-age creations from the usual suspects, like Luigi Colani, Joe Colombo and Verner Panton, as well as the occasional leftfield choice (Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s ‘Argyle’ chair (1897) in Blade Runner (1982), for example).

There are also pieces that pioneered new technologies like 3D-printed metal and even the dreaded NFTs, the latter exemplified by Reisinger’s own digital creations, which delve into the uncharted and thus overlooked realm of the Metaverse. 

Science fiction was once treated as a temperature check on the technological issues facing society and contemporary culture, filtered through aesthetics and aspirations. The furniture on display at Vitra showcase how this relationship is increasingly two way.

‘Science Fiction Design: From Space Age to Metaverse’, 18 May 2024 – 11 May 2025, Vitra Schaudepot, Weil am Rhein, Germany, Design-Museum.de

A selection of our favourites pieces from the show

There is an increasing awareness that design can play a vital role in the transition away from fossil fuels and carbon emissions, as we seek to reduce humans’ harmful impacts on the natural environment. In a new exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, ‘Transform! Designing the Future of Energy’ (until 1 September 2024), the topic of energy is highlighted as a key area in which design can bring about changes – from solar-powered products to city-scale power infrastructure. 

The future of energy at Vitra Design Museum

‘The energy transition and a reduction of our energy consumption is urgently needed,’ says Jochen Eisenbrand, curator of the show. ‘I am absolutely convinced that design, architecture and planning will need to play an essential role.’

Energy is generated by an array of sources, from the sun’s rays to burning fossil fuels. We need some form of energy to power daily activities, whether that’s working on a computer, heating our home, switching on the lights or travelling on public transport.

Energy from renewable sources such as wind, water and sun is being harnessed by designers in inventive ways that provide alternatives to carbon-intensive processes. In the exhibition, projects featured include the Papilio streetlamp by product designer Tobias Trübenbacher, a sculptural wind turbine-meets-streetlamp that is fully powered by wind turning its green rotor blades. Although designed as off-grid, the lamp can be connected to a power grid to feed surplus energy into the network during strong winds.

Sunne, by Dutch designer Marjan van Aubel, is a solar-powered hanging, horizontal lamp that imitates the quality of natural sunlight. When hung in a bright spot by a window during the day, the lamp harvests and stores energy from the sun; by night, it exudes light into the room.

Solar Shirt, by Dutch fashion designer Pauline van Dongen, integrates photovoltaic cells into a T-shirt, generating electricity to charge the wearer’s smartphone. Photovoltaic cells are also used on the Covestro Sonnenwagen, a solar-powered race car, while Sono Motors installs solar panels on large buses and trucks in order to help reduce their carbon emissions.

But ‘Transform!’ looks beyond the expansion of renewable energy sources alone, highlighting ways in which multiple designs can work together to reduce energy consumption and harmful emissions. Architecture is a key field where this plays out, as buildings are responsible for roughly a third of global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

The exhibition presents Germany’s Plus Energy Quarter P18 in Bad Cannstatt, developed by Werner Sobek in collaboration with AktivHaus, which features a self-sufficient heating system comprised of heat pumps, photovoltaic thermal collectors, and the controlled ventilation of interior living spaces.

The Powerhouse Brattørkaia in Trondheim, Norway, designed by architecture practice Snøhetta, is an energy-positive building, producing more energy than it consumes over its lifespan, feeding the surplus back into a local microgrid. This is achieved by designs including extensive solar panels, optimisation of natural daylight, efficient insulation, high thermal mass, heat recovery systems, and using seawater for heating and cooling.

District- or city-wide designs – what the exhibition calls ‘future energyscapes’ – includes the Energiebunker in Hamburg, a former air raid bunker converted into a power plant using renewable forms of energy, with a large heat reservoir, to supply the local area with sustainable heat, while feeding renewable power into the Hamburg distribution grid.

Hot Heart is Italian architect Carlo Ratti’s pioneering proposal for Helsinki featuring an archipelago of heat-storing basins with the dual function of storing thermal energy and providing space for recreational activities.

Throughout the show, historic examples of innovative energy designs are also presented, including German architect Herman Sörgel’s ‘Atlantropa’ project from the 1930s, an idea for a land mass supplied with hydroelectric power.

Energy ‘is one of the forces that keep our society running’, says Eisenbrand, ‘and the types of energy sources we use have great consequences for our natural and built environment.’ Nevertheless, he adds, ‘even though it is hard to stay optimistic these days, I think we have to.'

‘Transform! Designing the Future of Energy’ is on view at Vitra Design Museum until 1 September 2024

Charles-Eames-Straße 2
79576 Weil am Rhein
Germany

design-museum.de

The exhibition ‘Garden Futures: Designing with Nature’  – a collaborative project by the Vitra Design Museum, Wüstenrot Foundation, and Nieuwe Instituut – delves into the rich history and potential of modern gardens. The exhibition (on view until 3 October 2023) redefines gardens as avant-garde spaces for social justice, biodiversity, and sustainability. 

‘Garden Futures’: gardens as reflections of identities and visions

The exhibition poses questions about contemporary garden ideals and their role in shaping a liveable future. It showcases diverse examples, from urban farms to community gardens and works by renowned designers like Roberto Burle Marx and Derek Jarman. As soon as you walk inside the museum, on your left, you can see a selection of classic fences, garden tools and lounge chairs up on walls, while walking in the main room you are welcomed by Jurgen Bey’s 1998 Tree-trunk for Droog Design, a bench made of a rough tree trunk with bronze backrests.

Designed by Formafantasma, the exhibition's architecture sets the stage for exploring gardens as reflections of identities and visions. It reveals how gardens combine practicality with profound symbolism, exemplified by the work of artists like Hans Thoma and Alvar Aalto. Gardens are not just personal retreats; they carry social, historical, and cultural influences.

The exhibition uncovers the colonial history intertwined with Western gardens and explores the integration of gardens into urban planning concepts. In the face of major global challenges like the climate crisis and social injustice, gardens become spaces for healing and learning. 

On the upper floor, which is defined by a grass-like moquette, projects like Alexandra Kehayoglou's ‘Meadow’ (2023) – a huge, impressive carpet on which it is impossible to walk – highlight climate change threats, while Thomas Rustemeyer's scroll showcases innovative and traditional practices. 

The exhibition's final section focuses on the future of gardens; ‘Garden Futures’ widens our perception of gardens as dynamic spaces that embody cultural and environmental aspirations. It inspires visitors to envision gardens as catalysts for a sustainable and equitable world. Gardens hold immense potential to shape a better future for all. And they are just good for all of us.

‘Garden Futures: Designing with Nature’ is on view until 3 October 2023

Vitra Design Museum
Charles-Eames-Str. 2
D-79576 Weil am Rhein
Germany

design-museum.de

Renowned Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf has created a lush 4,000 sq m perennial garden for Vitra, bringing a touch of nature to the company's headquarters in the southern German town of Weil am Rhein. Its opening could not be more perfectly timed: having endured long stretches of domestic confinement in the past year, we now crave gardens, fresh air, and horizons afforded by wide open spaces. 

Vitra Campus: a haven of architecture and design in Weil am Rhein

The Vitra Campus is a stone’s throw from the Dreiländereck, where the borders of Germany, France and Switzerland meet. It’s a corner of Europe rich with art and design institutional muscle; Fondation Beyeler, the Museum Tinguely, and Art Basel, when in session, are all less than a 15-minute drive away. Buildings on the campus include a fire station by Zaha Hadid, a Jasper Morrison bus stop, a viewing tower with a slide by Carsten Höller, a petrol station designed by Jean Prouvé, a conference pavilion by Tadao Ando, a geodesic dome by Richard Buckminster Fuller, a small cabin designed by Renzo Piano, and more. VitraHaus – the flagship store that Oudolf’s garden surrounds – was designed and built by Herzog & de Meuron in 2010. The clean, exacting lines and modern fabrications of the architecture both contrast with and complement Oudolf’s landscaping – his complex planting techniques favour texture and structure over frothy blooms, creating year-round ambience so natural as to appear free of human intervention. 

‘As we do not intend to construct new buildings in the foreseeable future, it seemed that a garden would be an interesting expansion of the campus’ concept,’ says Rolf Fehlbaum, Vitra’s chairman emeritus. Fehlbaum had been impressed by Oudolf’s work for the 2010 Venice Biennale and the High Line in New York. ‘I found his approach fabulous, so when the theme of a garden on the Vitra Campus came up, I immediately thought of him.’ 

Integrating nature with architecture

Fehlbaum, who is no gardener and has no plans to become one, still extols the powerful ‘potential of integrating nature in the campus, helping Vitra to go further and develop the whole campus as a cohesive landscape’. He points out that landscaping has incrementally become part of Vitra’s HQ; first when Álvaro Siza designed the factory building and the adjoining parking lot, in 1994, and more importantly with the Álvaro Siza Promenade, in 2014.

Initially, the new garden was to be planted around the Frank Gehry-designed Vitra Design Museum, but Oudolf persuaded Fehlbaum, and his brother Raymond, a director at Vitra, that it would be more captivating set in front of the VitraHaus. ‘They had this place with fruit trees in the front of the restaurant, and I thought it would be great if people coming in and out could see something dynamic with plants and flowers,’ says Oudolf . ‘You immediately take the visitors in.’

Captivating the audience is always Oudolf’s starting point. A composer of sorts, he artfully crafts pathways through bushes of allium and echinacea, fluidly guiding visitors to experience and enjoy every inch of flora. ‘The idea is that people can wander there, sit and spend some time, and experience the plants from all sides. I think that is important, especially in public spaces. You can walk around and lose yourself a little bit, it’s not a straight path,’ he says. 

Piet Oudolf's garden design for Vitra

Oudolf’s planting feels characteristically accidental, but is incredibly precise and intentional. The Vitra Campus garden uses more than 30,000 plants with many species and this takes expert organisation: feathery Asclepias tuberosa; reddish Sporobolus heterolepis; giant daisy-like Echinacea pallida; raspberry-coloured brush heads of Sanguisorba menziesii; violet fuzzy baubles of Echinops ritro; candy floss clouds of Filipendula rubra. 

‘I use many design narratives and concepts in one garden. Part of this garden is wilder with more grasses that are dominant, and there’s an area where the plants are taller and more robust. Around the building we have a different concept, a “matrix” planting. There are many considered things you might not notice individually, but you can feel the ambience when you are in the garden,’ he says. 

When planning, Oudolf considers the calendar of the garden, creating points of interest that will flourish year round. ‘Gardens should be interesting all year long,’ he insists. ‘The plants that I choose in my designs often have another life after flowering. The colour is only there for a month or two.’ Part of Oudolf’s genius lies in his appreciation of the architecture and structure of plants beyond petals, the framework they provide to an outdoor space. 

He works by first of all sketching his designs on drafting paper, much like an architect, and will colour code the plants according to flowering schedule or their physical properties. Next, he draws a grid over the design, which will later be marked out on the ground using string, to create a guide that allows him to transfer the designs on paper to the soil, one square at a time. 

Needless to say, the planting of a garden as intricate as this during the pandemic was challenging. Although planning began in October 2019 (in preparation for the full bloom grand opening originally scheduled for summer 2020), Oudolf was constrained to his home in Hummelo, the Netherlands, for most of the duration of the preparation. The plants, in their thousands, were positioned in situ under Oudolf’s guidance via video calls. Although he has no employees, he works with a network of trusted individuals and organisations. A local planting team, led by the landscape architect Bettina Jaugstetter and supported by Jelle Bennema of Deltavormgroep, carefully executed his plans under his stewardship. 
 
In July 2020, while the regional lockdown was temporarily lifted, Oudolf was able to drive the seven hours south from his home to the Vitra site. He met Jaugstetter on site and they reviewed the planting, noting any inconsistencies. ‘Often there are varieties that get delivered incorrectly, misnamed by accident. If you buy or order from a grower, you have to account [for the fact] that they also buy from other growers,’ Oudolf explains, observing that every industry has its supply chain issues. ‘We made some adjustments and moved some plants around.

‘In the fall of 2020, we had to prepare a bulb plan for crocuses, snowdrops and narcissi, so in February 2021 there would be something in flower. Perennials that grow in full sun start [to bloom] in May and June, and the main flowering period is August and September. In November 2020, pruning and more planting prepared the garden for a snowy winter so that it could emerge in spring 2021 in good shape, along with the rest of us.’ 

The past year has sparked an exodus from many of the world’s major cities as residents pursue a newly discovered desire for more outside space. ‘You hear, in general, that people want more greenery, and cities are spending more money on gardens and so on, and that happens more and more. You see that people that stay at home are starting to garden more, and you realise that we need more of this in our lives,’ says Oudolf. ‘I like gardens to be for everyone. I hope what I do inspires people to start with plants, and also inspires them to see the power of plants. You can only do that by creating a design that has a layer over it you cannot define, the thing that makes the garden so good and makes you want to stay. That is what I try to emphasise, to create something that is more than just plants.’ 

INFORMATION

vitra.com
oudolf.com

ADDRESS

Vitra Campus
Charles-Eames-Straße 2
79576 Weil am Rhein
Germany

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

Those working in the business of residential interior design often feel frustrated that while there is plenty of compelling and serious conversation around the topic of housing, the design of the domestic interior is increasingly trivialised.

Hoping to redress the balance, ‘Home Stories: 100 Years, 20 Visionary Interiors’ is a new major exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein that celebrates the power of the interior. The show highlights how in the past century, the Western domestic interior has come to reflect some of the most pressing issues of our time.

To tackle this vast and ambitious subject, curators Jochen Eisenbrand and Anna-Mea Hoffmann selected 20 game-changing interiors from the past 100 years to guide the show’s narrative. References to superficial trends or styles are avoided and the focus is placed firmly on ideas.

‘There was the question of how to show interior design in the exhibition,' recalls Eisenbrand. ‘We decided not to try to recreate any interiors because we think that this never really works in a museum context. You don’t have daylight, you don’t have a sequence of spaces, and in the end it always seems a bit dead and dusty.'

Set Design

The exhibition is filled with drawings, documents, films, photographs, furniture and models laid out across an understated set design by Joseph Grima’s studio Space Caviar. Intended to function as a simple but elegant backdrop to the complex and layered issues presented, the display stands are made from a system of modular cork bricks topped with mirrored surfaces. Grima says the system can be endlessly reconfigured as the exhibition travels to different locations, and beyond that, can be repurposed as building materials.

Laid out in reverse chronological order and split into four sections, the exhibition takes visitors backwards through time from the present day to the 1920s.

‘The reason for going back in time is to show that present day is not necessarily better than 100 years ago,' explains Hoffmann. ‘Although I hope we have learnt from our mistakes, this layout demonstrates that there is never a linear history.’

Space Economy and Atmosphere: 2000 – Today

In this section, issues of dwindling urban space and the impact of social media are explored through projects such as an apartment designed by architecture studio Elii where furnishings fold out of walls. A slide show of images selected by Jasper Morrison serve as a visual essay that meditate on the question of what makes a ‘good interior'. ‘I have an idea of what makes a “good object” but making a good room is more complex,’ says Morrison. ‘Exceptional interiors are much rarer than exceptional objects, and few people have the skill necessary to create them.’

Rethinking the Interior: 1960 – 1980

Along with the radical new design approaches that came with movements such as Memphis, in section Rethinking the Interior: 1960 – 1980, we witness how society’s perception of furniture shifted – from heirlooms to be treasured and passed down through generations to consumer products that could be disposed of as fashion changes.

Nature and Technology: 1940 – 1960

This area highlights how homely Scandinavian interiors, such as those seen in the home of architect Finn Juhl, became increasingly influential and architects such as Lina Bo Bardi started to blur the boundaries between indoors and out.

The Birth of the Modern Interior: 1920 – 1940

In this final section, we see the emergence of concepts, such as the open-plan interiors championed by Mies van der Rohe, that still dominate today. Exhibits include a reconstruction of the world’s first fitted kitchen designed by Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in 1926. Schütte-Lihotzky wanted the Frankfurt Kitchen to make modern life more streamlined and ultimately reduce the burden of women’s labour in the home.

The Frankfurt kitchen is one of three life-size installations dotted throughout the show – the other two include George Candilis’ clinical Hexacube micro-house from 1972, which is placed outside the museum entrance, and Verner Panton’s upholstered Phantasy Landscape room, which visitors are free to explore in Zaha Hadid’s nearby Fire Station building.

‘I want visitors to see how diverse the discipline is, how many changes there have been throughout history and how design not only reflects us as individuals but society as a whole,' reflects Hoffmann. ‘Some of the projects showcased could be seen as failed visions. We didn’t want to only showcase interiors that worked out perfectly because design is about failure and innovation.'

INFORMATION

‘Home Stories: 100 Years, 20 Visionary Interiors,’ Vitra Design Museum, until 23 August.

design-museum.de

ADDRESS

Vitra Design Museum
Charles-Eames-Straße 2
79576Weil am Rhein
Germany

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

Surrealism was one of the most important artistic movements of the last century. But how did the principles of surrealism, that originated in Paris' avant-garde circles of the 1920s, translate into the period's design? This is the question posed by Vitra Design Museum, which has opened exhibition ‘Objects of Desire: Surrealism and Design 1924 – Today’.

‘Surrealism was one of the most influential artistic movements of the 20th century. Many works by surrealists such as Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Meret Oppenheim or Man Ray were inspired by everyday objects and explored the world of dreams, emotions and unconsciousness built into our material culture,’ says Mateo Kries, curator of the exhibition and director of Vitra Design Museum. ‘Since the 1930s, Surrealism has had a significant impact on design, from furniture, interiors and fashion to film and graphic design.’

In the history of decorative arts, the topic of surrealism in design was always overlooked as it was dominanted by the modernist movement. It was only in 2007 when the Victoria & Albert Museum in London presented the ‘Surreal Things’ exhibition that the movement and its influence was categorised for the first time on a such a scale.

The French movement was established in 1924, when its spiritual father André Breton founded a Surrealist group. Until now, it has mostly been associated with dreamy and fantastical visions of painters and sculptors. However, soon after its discovery, the concept reached the world of utility objects and interior design too – its ironic principles and absurd stories have since been used by designers across the globe.

The exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum presents surrealism as a general tendency or timeless philosophy for the first time. Through a very diverse selection of artists and designers, the showcase tells the story of surrealism and its connection to the material world through many different works.

On display are decorative objects from the golden era of surrealism, created by Salvador Dalí or Jean-Michel Frank, including the famous Mae West sofa. Later, global influence is reflected in the work of Isamu Noguchi, Carlo Mollino, Frederick Kiesler and unorthodox Italian decorator Aldo Tura.

Renowned works of Achille Castiglioni, Ray Eames or Shiro Kuramata are also presented in a new light, layered with ironic jokes and mysterious stories. Evidence of the movement's timelessness is presented by a selection of contemporary artists such as Front Design, Jerszy Seymour, BLESS, and Konstantin Grcic, among many others, highlighting the breadth of surrealist influences in design from past and present. 

INFORMATION

‘Objects of Desire: Surrealism and Design 1924 – Today’ is on view until 19 January 2020. design-museum.de/en

ADDRESS

Charles-Eames-Straße 2
79576 Weil am Rhein
Germany

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

The first solo exhibition of architect Balkrishna Doshi’s work outside of Asia, has opened at Vitra Design Museum. Global interest in the Indian architect – who worked with Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn and brought modernism to India with his distinct philosophy – has soared since being named the 2018 Pritzker laureate. Yet, Mateo Kries, director of the museum, is keen to express that the show had been in planning since 2017 – Vitra was one step ahead.

So why in this year that also celebrates Bauhaus and Vitra Design Museum’s 30th anniversary is Doshi the architect of choice? A visit to the exhibition will make this clear – Doshi is a humanist whose philosophies on housing, education, sustainability and urbanism are still as urgent as when he started practicing architecture in the 1950s.

One of those priorities, that of the ‘home’, is close to Vitra’s heart: ‘Housing for Doshi is much more than creating walls and places for people to stay, housing for him is a philosophical place,’ says Kries. And here, at the home of Vitra – where design pieces are born with a respect for the past and a guarantee for the future and comfortable living environments are layered up at the VitraHaus – Doshi’s philosophy of ‘home’ is held up high with much esteem.

In his opening talk – so grossly over-subscribed that it relocates to a vast warehouse space on the Vitra campus – Doshi says: ‘Delight, joy, curiosity, that is how you create places, moulding these things in your mind. You have to think, what would I enjoy most?’ When he receives a commission from a client, he asks them about their family, their neighbours, what they do on Sunday. ‘Because everything we build, we build for human beings.’

A unique insight into the world of Doshi has been brought to the Vitra Design Museum by curator Kushnu Hoof, director of the Vastushipla Foundation – who is also Doshi’s grand-daughter. Alongside Jolanthe Kugler, Vitra Design Musem curator, Hoof adapted the exhibition from an exhibition of Doshi’s work at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, and adding large-scale installations that offer visitors a spatial understanding of his work.

One of the installations represents the proportions of Doshi’s own home in Ahmedabad, Kamala House built in 1963. Here space is used modestly and democratically, something that his own house has in common with the housing projects he has designed for others.

Whether it’s by blurring the lines of India’s caste system, driving the economy, or even just suggesting that everyone is equal, Doshi embeds democracy into his architecture. The housing for the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) in Ahmedabad (1973) integrates social groups together using stacked blocks, shared entrances and colour. While at the Aranya low cost housing project in Indore (1989) Doshi participated in designing a new model for economic growth by providing an infrastructure combined with ‘units’ supplied with the key elements of a plinth, electricity and toilet, to lower income families to build and adapt to their own needs.

Doshi learnt that there is no distinction between object and living from Le Corbusier, who he worked for on the Chandigarh project where ideas of life, urbanism, and modernism came together in India, where the climate and culture demanded something new from modernism. And from Louis Khan, Doshi learnt to make friends with his clients to be able to build what he wanted.

Wise advice no doubt on both accounts, yet Doshi has much to teach too. He says that the thing he taught Le Corbusier was naivety, and his own advice for designing is to be like a child, to look things in new ways and not be constricted by history and tradition.

The exhibition explores Doshi’s interest in education in depth. In 1968, he founded the School of Architecture at the Centre for Environment and Planning (CEPT) in Ahmedabad. Here he could define his own laws of architecture, and challenge students to think differently. Another large-scale installation is that of the art gallery Amdavad Ni Gufa built on the CEPT campus in 1994. Designed digitally and built by unskilled labourers, this ‘Gufa’ or cave has no foundations or walls and is covered in broken porcelain saucers salvaged from factory waste. Bubbling up from the exhibition floor, the structure asks us to re-evaluate everything we thought we knew about architecture.

Living organisms sprout across the walls of the exhibition too through architectural drawings, plans and photographs – from the mushrooming modules of the MPEB office campus in Japalpur (1979) to the lush plant-layered courtyards of the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore (1977), and at Sangath, his studio and oasis in Ahmedabad where his respect for nature can be seen in his mural to a mango tree that died. ‘Sangath is his own sanctuary, he’s put every experience he has ever has together into this,’ says Hoof.

Many of Doshi’s designs are modular, echoing ecological forms, yet also very practically providing the flexibility that was needed in India from the 1950s during a period of rapid post-Independence change – architecture had to be prepared for shifting contexts, it had to be self-perpetuating and ever-evolving like a city that takes into account of the chaos of change, creation and growth.

Inspired by the aesthetic and perspective of Indian miniatures where ‘space, activity and landscape are layered and you can see how the space feels through one singular image’, says Hoof, Doshi’s paintings, drawings and models are multi-dimensional, and full of life, combining architecture with a whole set of cultural philosophies.

Doshi is always thinking of the bigger picture, approaching architecture like urbanism: ‘When he made a project, he made a project for the area around it too, he was not looking at it in isolation, but of how to improve the life of the whole area,’ says Hoof.

‘I call architecture not a building, but a habitat, a living organism,’ says Doshi. And it is this approach that makes his work sustainable ‘in a wider sense, not just the narrow economical sense’ says Kries. When he designed the Premabhai Hall (1976) he later also designed an urban system for the whole Bhadra Plaza to connect all the main building podiums with pedestrian walkways; while the design for the Digambar Jain temple complex in Pune (2004, unbuilt) infilled the outer walls of the temple with apartments for employees to live.

‘Sustainability is comprehensive. When [architecture] is isolated then it is not sustainable. As an architect you have to think at macro scale. Why should we think architecture is only building? Are we building tombs that cannot grow?’ says Doshi. The exhibition carries many powerful lessons, such as this, that seem timeless – Doshi is now 92 years old and has been working over a period of 60 years – yet somehow, these lessons also seem increasingly urgent.

INFORMATION

‘Balkrishna Doshi: Architecture for the People’ is on view until 8 September 2019. For more information, visit the Vitra Design Museum website

ADDRESS

Vitra Design Museum
Charles-Eames-Straße 2
79576 Weil am Rhein
Germany

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

Dry ice, block rockin’ beats and a DJ booth elevated on high from a Konstantin Grcic pimped up Smart car… the preview of ‘Night Fever: Designing Club Culture 1960-Today’ wasn’t your average exhibition launch. But then the subject matter is as visceral as it is theoretical. Indeed, few exhibitions are likely to inspire as much instantaneous joy and nostalgia than this, debuting at the Vitra Design Museum.

Attempting to capture snapshots of an ephemeral phenomenon is brave, but encapsulating recent folk history is also a canny move. Reminding people how they tripped the light fantastic during their late teens and twenties – the most liberating decades of anyone’s life – Night Fever surely has crowd-pleasing blockbuster written all over it. Something that didn’t escape the trio of curators, Jochen Eisenbrand (Vitra Design Museum), Catharine Rossi (Kingston University London) and Katarina Serulus (ADAM - Brussels Design Museum). Vitra museum director Mateo Kries put it succinctly when he said: ‘Few other topics speak so directly to a museum visitor and recall such intense memories and feelings. We all remember experiencing nightlife, a place where you had the most memorable moments with music and dancing.’

Beyond this rose-tinted reminiscing though, there is depth. Nightclub design is not just a superficial glitterball of a topic that only deserves to shine after dark. It projects a kaleidscope of reflections, which in their fleeting spontaneity can reveal much about how we live. (As French semiotician Roland Barthes recognised when he penned his 1978 essay on Paris’s Le Palace club.) What makes nocturnal adventures in clubland so appealing, from an immersive perspective and as subjective museum fodder, is its deeply entrenched love affair with the avant-garde, creativity and experimentation (something I explored in my 2002 book Bar & Club Design; Laurence King).

Clubs are liberating spaces where playing with identity and self-expression through dress, music, dance and drugs is encouraged by equally outré, theatrical or radical interiors and graphics. ‘Design here is about not about sharing an object,’ Kries added, ‘it’s about sharing moments and experiences. Clubs often reflect changes in society, and are a condensed image of what happens in society.’ What’s more, short-lived throwaway nocturnal spaces are often where the designers of tomorrow hone their skills.

Compiling ‘Night Fever’ wasn’t easy, it’s still relatively unexplored territory and much of the information presented here is compiled from aural histories. Loans came from just three institutions; the majority of items were contributed by individuals – 50 in total from architects, designers, DJs and die-hard devotees (and memorabilia collectors) of legendary clubs like Manchester’s Haçienda (the frenzied fandom of which is revealed in a documentary of those who bought fragments of the club when it was auctioned off) New York’s Studio 54 and The Paradise Garage.

Strangely, Ibiza doesn’t feature, but as co-curator Catharine Rossi says, ‘We don’t pretend its comprehensive that would be impossible, but we recognise it is a global story. Every culture creates its own nightlife, sealed off spaces that are heterotopian places where you can go and be who you want to be.’ The excellent accompanying catalogue is more extensive and packed with interesting essays and interviews with DJs and club operators.

Wisely eschewing the temptation to recreate an actual club environment (it was initially muted) the exhibition is arranged chronologically through four exhibition halls, each named after pop and rock songs with seminal venues presented as case studies throughout to tell the story. Hall 1, Beginning to See the Light, explores the 1960s and how nightclubs such as New York’s fantastically named The Electric Circus (1967), Florence’s Space Electronic (1969) and Munich’s Yellow Submarine (1971) emerged alongside new counter cultures and alternative lifestyles. There is a particular focus on here Italian clubs associated with Italy’s Radical Design movement. Materials on display range from poster graphics, photography, magazine articles, film and furniture, including a discotastic chair by Gufram.

Neon signs replicating club logos, industrial structural elements, film footage and the use of blown-up photography effectively bring the topic to life, but it’s Hall 2 – Can you feel it? – where visitors will immerse themselves and get lost in music. Konstantin Grcic and lighting designer Matthias Singer’s interactive installation takes the form of a mirrored booth lined with a grid of multi-coloured neon lighting that pulsates, reflecting into infinity. It’s Justin Timberlake’s Rock your Body video meets silent disco. Headphones suspended from the ceiling enable visitors to plug into four distinct decades and music genres: pre-disco, disco, house and techno. The playlists are spot on; House features Frankie Knuckles Tears, Mr Fingers Can you feel it? and Phuture’s Acid Tracks.

The euphoric mood climaxes with disco and Slave to the Rhythm (Hall 3), signposted by a giant screen playing John Travolta’s mesmerising Saturday Night Fever dance routine on loop. Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell’s Studio 54 is the undeniable star here, dazzling hand-in-hand with dancefloor partners – celebrity culture and fashion. This is when clubbing transformed into a decadent performance art of its own, with the venues of the Seventies and Eighties occupying old theatres, cinemas and film studios, encouraging the see-and-be-seen ethos.

We follow its inevitable commercialisation as it gives way to the new edgier, grungier House music scene, initially fuelled by gay subculture and rising up from the post-industrial landscape of American – represented here by The Paradise Garage and later in the UK Ben Kelly’s Haçienda. Rave culture gets a look in too as part of Mark Leckey’s brilliantly evocative short film Fiorucci Made me Hardcore (1999) and this was surely the age of the inventive flier, as proven by examples from the UK Acid House and the 1990s club scene.

Around the World concludes Night Fever, charting the flourishing of techno in the vast vacant buildings of post-wall Berlin, while also documenting the widespread demise of the nightclub and the emergence of the commercialised global club brand. London’s Ministry of Sound is highlighted for its diversification into other lifestyle arenas – namely work (with new co-working spaces) and leisure (gyms) –  catering to changes in social behaviour in order to survive.

We look to the future, as the urban nightclub wanes, it’s superseded by open-air music festivals and pop-up clubs, with case studies including Carsten Höller’s club for Prada, Assemble’s Newcastle stage for Belgium’s Horst festival and incredible Brazilian sound systems. There is less here about the club goer and more focus on architectural models and the technology, from sound systems to the turntables of choice.

For those who hark back to the clubbing heydays of the 1970s, 80s and 90s that felt such fertile, anarchic places for youth subcultures and alternative identities to thrive – this denouement feels like a bit of a comedown. However, if anything Night Fever demonstrates that although the clubs of yesteryear may become the luxury flats of tomorrow, people will always seek music-fuelled escapism en masse and these spaces will continue to mutate (note that illegal raves have increased in recent years).

Meanwhile, designers and artists continue to flirt with hedonistic spaces; last year Carsten Höller’s The Prada Double Club pop-up was the highlight of Design Miami and this year’s Salone del Mobile promises to be the year of the club with a renewed interest in creating after-dark spaces from India Mahdavi’s Chez Nina private club for Nilufar to Disco Gufram, from Studiopepe’s Club Unseen to Lasvit’s Cabaret.

For the art and design community at least, night fever continues to burn, baby burn and for that we salute them.

INFORMATION

‘Night Fever: Designing Club Culture 1960 – Today’ is on view until 9 September, after which the exhibition will travel to Belgium. For more information visit the Vitra Design Museum website

When Gufram owner Charley Vezza first saw the deflated, Dalíesque disco balls created by Dutch artist duo Rotganzen, he knew they would be a perfect addition to the nightclub-inspired collection he was plotting.

Dancing had been on his mind since he found an old catalogue of contract furniture for discotheques in the Gufram archives. Dating from the 1980s, it featured a series of striking modular upholstered pieces. When Vezza showed it to the designers at Milan-based studio Atelier Biagetti, he kickstarted one of his company’s most exciting collaborations to date and a celebration of a particularly innovative space and time for Italian design.

‘There has been a growing interest in the Radical design movement in the past five years, and what it means for us today,’ says Catharine Rossi. A design researcher with a strong focus on the nightclub phenomenon, she is co-curator of a new show at Vitra’s Design Museum. ‘There has also been a growing interest in club culture, an area in which these Radical designers were active: the only spaces they actually built were discos,’ she adds. Nightclubs gave them space ‘to experiment and imagine... outside of commercial and corporate constraints’.

Disco design is an important part of Gufram’s history: the first such clubs appeared in Italy in the mid-1960s, around the time the company was founded, and some of the most iconic venues were designed by the same creatives that gravitated around its HQ – then something of an ideas factory – in Barolo, northern Italy. These architects were part of the Radical design movement, developed between Florence, Turin and Milan in the 1960s and dedicated to aesthetic innovation and experimentation. Radical architects Giorgio Ceretti, Pietro Derossi and Riccardo Rosso, designed some of Italy’s swankiest disco spaces, including Piper in Turin and L’Altromondo Studios in Rimini, a legendary club still operating today. Both were furnished with colourful seats produced by Gufram. The brand’s avant-garde approach later led to collaborations with the likes of architects Studio 65 to produce iconic pieces such as the ‘Bocca’ lips-shaped sofa.

Since 2011, Vezza and his team have been working to preserve Gufram’s heritage, while introducing new designers to build on the brand’s cult status. Delving into the company’s past is not an easy task: ‘It’s like having an immense puzzle to build, piece by piece, as we don’t have a traditional archive that we can work with,’ explains Vezza. ‘I always say that Gufram wrote the history of design without knowing it, so there was never a strong attention to documentation.’

The new collection is a playful take on an illustrious history, pulled off with typical Gufram exuberance. Each collaboration developed organically: first came Rotganzen, whose signature disco balls (originally created for site-specific installations) feature on a series of lacquered cabinets. Then Vezza turned to Alberto Biagetti and Laura Baldessari of Atelier Biagetti to reinterpret 1980s seating. ‘I immediately thought of them for two reasons: their innovative work on upholstered furniture, and the fact that they come from Romagna, an Italian region famous for its iconic nightlife,’ says Vezza.

The pair drew inspiration from the area’s clubs, such as Baia Imperiale and Coccoricò, but also reinterpreted elements of Gufram’s back catalogue into five new modular sofa designs, including a tartan and pink neon number, a large velvet offering, a soft blob of shimmering lilac, as well as a cluster of iridescent pouffes, and a golden leather sofa that can repeat and extend to create either a twisting or semi-circular composition. It is the first time that Gufram, a specialist in polyurethane foam, has produced upholstered furniture. The collaboration was ‘a meeting of minds’, say Biagetti and Baldessari. ‘We feel very close to Gufram’s cultural codes and references; it’s a company which moves very fast when it comes to innovation and research.’

The last piece in Vezza’s discotheque had to be a suitably groovy floor to showcase the furniture. Gufram head of product Axel Iberti commissioned Gaëlle Gabillet and Stéphane Villard’s Paris design studio GGSV to create a series of graphic rugs after coming across one of their dazzling installations at the Centre Pompidou. The ‘Dance Floor’ rugs were developed to invite dancers to stand in the middle and ‘do the freak’, the designers explain. ‘There is something excessive and very joyful in disco: it’s very Gufram.’

‘A furniture company speaks through its products, and our collections express a maximalist radical spirit,’ concludes Vezza. ‘This same spirit drives us to still be radical in all the choices we make every day.’

As originally featured in the April 2018 issue of Wallpaper* (W*229)

INFORMATION

Disco Gufram will be at Wallpaper* Handmade from 17 – 21 April. For more information, visit the Gufram website

ADDRESS

Mediateca Santa Teresa 

28 Via della 

Moscova 20121

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

We’ve scoured the globe to find the most captivating, uncanny and memorable design exhibitions. From retrospectives and major blockbusters to thematic exhibitions and solo shows, here’s the design events not to miss this month.

Louis Vuitton Objets Nomades, Hong Kong

Hong Kong-based architect Joyce Wang has transformed two floors of the city’s former Central Magistracy into a grand pop-up that perfectly balances the colonial architecture, contemporary rooms and niches to create an immersive experience of Louis Vuitton’s Objets Nomades travel-inspired furniture and accessories. The poetic and cinematic feel is enhanced with whimsical touches including a dining-room with walls clad in bamboo and vertical greenery, elegant diaphanous steel mesh archways and a virtual swimming pool. Standout new pieces include a chair in riotously patterned fabric by Raw Edges and Patricia Urquiola’s simple ‘Overlay’ bowl, a sculpture of four leather sheets, created for Les Petits Nomades. Writer: Catherine Shaw

Until March 31; Tai Kwun, Block 9, Central Magistracy, 10 Hollywood Road

Neotenic Design at A/D/O, New York

Leave it to A/D/O to give the emergence of ‘cute’ furniture and design a real name. The term ‘neoteny’ is traditionally a zoological reference to the retention of juvenile features in an adult animal, but it could easily also apply to the proliferation of childlike features and proportions, such as thick legs and rounded feet, in design over the last ten years. Curated by A/D/O members, the design firm Jumbo, ‘Neotenic Design’ brings together objects from designers like Faye Toogood, Konstantin Grcic, Big Game and Pierre Yovanovitch, to show how the trend for rounded, chubby shapes in design actually elicits an emotional response that we are subconsciously seeking.

Until 28 March; 29 Norman Ave, Brooklyn, NY

The strange order of things, by Nathalie Du Pasquier at Pace Gallery, Seoul

This is the second exhibition of work by Nathalie Du Pasquier at Pace in Seoul and it is a particularly personal one, as the French artist and designer curated it herself. In an array of 30 paintings, drawings and ceramics, the show dives into the her engrossing visual world that started life in painting and travels through her time as a founding member of the Memphis Group. ‘For this exhibition, I’m interested in how things chosen from different moments in the last 20 years go together in a specific display,’ Du Pasquier mentions of the edit that forms an abstract dialogue in the space.

Until 25 May; 5F, 262, Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

Exhibitions documenting the life and work of Ettore Sottsass (1917–2007) abound this year as galleries and museums – such as The Met and Le Stanze del Vetro – celebrate what would have been the influential Austro-Italian designer’s 100th birthday. One of the latest surveys comes courtesy of furniture manufacturing megalith Vitra, which recently opened ‘Ettore Sottsass – Rebel and Poet’ at its Basel campus in Switzerland.

Located in the new Herzog & de Meuron-designed Schaudepot space, the exhibition sees the family-owned brand draw from its own archives to form a showcase of approximately 30 of Sottsass’ furniture designs, consumer products, as well as numerous photographs and writings. The exhibition, Vitra says, ‘pays tribute to an extraordinary designer who did not regard form and function as constraints, but rather viewed design as an opportunity to explore the nature of human existence’.

Supplemented by excerpts from Sottsass’ poetic and literary texts, as well as photographs from the ‘Metafore’ series (1972-1979), where Sottsass reveals his thoughts on fundamental design issues, the exhibition tracks the unconventional designer’s development, and demonstrates how he succeeded in challenging the established tastes of the middle class throughout his career.

His collaborations with furniture manufacturer Poltronova and office equipment manufacturer Olivetti resulted in bold, rule-breaking designs that demonstrate his early love of vivid colours and distinctive structures. His ‘Califfo’ sofa (1964) for Poltronova is among the exhibited works, as is his pillar box red ‘Valentine’ typewriter (1969) for Olivetti.

In the 1970s, Sottsass took on various roles: as a participant in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition ‘Italy: The New Domestic Landscape’ (1972); as a central figure of the design initiative Global Tools (1973-1975); and as a member of the design collective Alchimia (1976-1980), when he created the characterful ‘Seggiolina da Pranzo’ (1979-80) – one the 30 showcased pieces.

However, Sottsass is perhaps best remembered as the leading figure of the 1980s design collective Memphis, where he created some of his most distinctive work. Inspired by pop culture and liberated from a functionalist design approach, it was during this time that Sottsass created the ‘Carlton’ bookcase (1981), the lamps ‘Ashoka’ (1981) ‘Tahiti’ (1981), and the ‘Tartar’ table (1985).

Running until 24 September, Vitra’s exhibition serves as an insightful tribute to this 20th-century designer, rebel and poet, whose legacy continues to enrich our everyday lives.

INFORMATION

‘Ettore Sottsass – Rebel and Poet’ is on view until 24 September. For more information, visit the Vitra Museum website

ADDRESS

Vitra Schaudepot
Charles-Eames-Strasse 2
79576 Weil am Rhein

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

This year’s edition of the annual Vitra summer party in Weil am Rhein during Art Basel was a sun-drenched celebration of togetherness as some 3,000 members of the design, architecture and art crowds, plus sundry friends and business partners from all over the world gathered on the company’s campus lawns to eat, drink and make merry.

Basel city is packed during the art fair and hotels are often booked up months ahead, which means there is usually a last-minute flurry on social media of messages from people seeking room or flat shares. It’s all very communal but temporary before most of us go back to our homes in an equally limited, high-cost market governed by skyrocketing real estate prices.

The current exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum, ‘Together! The New Architecture of the Collective’, is about communal living of a more permanent kind. The first section of the show deals with historical experiments in collective living such as Robert Owen’s proto-socialist, paternalistic New Harmony project from 1825 in rural Indiana, or Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner’s 1925 modernist Hufeisensiedlung estate on the outskirts of Berlin, but then moves swiftly on to the more politically-motivated communes established in the 1960s and 70s that were all about rejecting ideas of individual ownership and bourgeois ideals, that often set the new communards in direct confrontation with the state.

But then the exhibition moves swiftly on to the collective impulses of the internet generation, where communal living now seems a logical conclusion of shared data, shared cars, crowdsourcing, couch-surfing and the like, and talks about a whole range of architectural projects that experiment with proportions of public/private space in an urban environment and reject the conventional model of housing designed for nuclear family units.

The show’s curators, Andreas and Ilka Ruby and architects EM2N, have built a 1:24 scale cityscape of models of 21 existing contemporary buildings from around the world that blur the boundaries of ‘family’ as well as the borders between residences and neighbourhoods. These buildings are not about gated communities, but about opening up ground floor areas for small business commerce and social amenities and designating rooftops as publically accessible communal gardens. Visitors can move around and between the models to get an immersive sense of how a more communal urban environment, by design, could work in what the curators call: ‘the city as a public living room’.

They then address the idea of ‘collective privacy’ with a 1:1 model of a ‘cluster apartment’ whose floor plan defines a number of micro apartments, each with its own bedroom, bathroom, kitchenette and living space, clustered around a central and much larger communal living room and cooking/dining area. The theoretical advantages of such a living constellation in contemporary society are obvious: single parent with small child who no longer needs to worry about a babysitter, an elderly person who no longer has to live alone, a student who perhaps helps with the shopping, a busy professional who can come home to a ‘family’ instead of just the cat and a houseplant to talk to.

Obviously this is all pretty utopian. Such housing projects demand endless discussion, negotiation and compromise, not just to build but to live in and maintain. One only has to think of all those modernist social living projects that ended up as ghettos or under the wrecker’s ball or gentrified beyond recognition and accessibility for the very people they were designed for. No organism thrives unless you feed and nurture it. Le Corbusier’s archetypical Wohnmaschine blocks of flats, for example, have long lost the rooftop nursery schools, communal laundry and social spaces, shops and bus stop in front of the door that made them initially so appealing for a mixed demographic of residents. Without these common space amenities they are just a bunch of boxes perched on top of each other, but these amenities were the first to fail back then.

Today, it could be argued, things are different: we have got used to sharing and being communal in new ways thanks to the internet. In addition the global population is aging, there are more singles than ever before, families are smaller or non-existent, we are far more mobile, less prissy about privacy and also rather less weighed down by bulky possessions than we used to be just a couple of decades ago. The current climate is pretty much ideal for a rethink of the collective.

In the final section of Together!, the exhibition gets into the nitty gritty of how to make it happen. On five desks it shows the evolution of the financing concepts and design processes of five different models: the Baugruppe (a building collective), the cooperative, the housing association, a private development and a blend of housing co-op and investment fund.

All in all this is a highly informative, if rather idealistic (but isn’t that the point?), exhibition about a topic that affects most of us particularly acutely right now: how are we going to live? It is easy to think of a lot of places and people that would benefit from its pragmatic clarity in pointing a highly inclusive way forward towards a future that cares more about quality of life for residents.

INFORMATION

‘Together! The New Architecture of the Collective’ is on view until 10 September. For more information, visit the Vitra Design Musuem website

ADDRESS

Vitra Design Museum,
Charles-Eames-Strasse 2
D-79576 Weil am Rhein

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

Looking up and down any train carriage on your way to work today and you can’t help but notice that almost every single person sits craned over a screen, staring blankly into its blue glare. In recent decades, the presence of technology in our day-to-day lives has gradually increased to the point that it has drastically changed the way in which we interact with each other. However, as Vitra Design Museum director Mateo Kries notes, it is only in the last two to three years that this phenomenon has been so intensely discussed. Last week, a new exhibition titled ‘Hello, Robot. Design between human and machine’ opened at Vitra’s Weil am Rhein Campus with the intention of examining the topic through the lens of design.

‘We’re not interested in displaying the latest technological innovations,’ says Kries of the exhibition’s focus. ‘Instead we looked at projects that say something about design and robotics – that really go beyond looking at the simple form or technology and instead say something about how we interact with the technology, how they interact with us and how they influence our interaction with other people.’

Divided into four chapters, the exhibition, curated by Amelie Klein and designed by Basel-based Emyl, takes visitors on a journey that begins by examining our historical relationship with robotics and ends in an equally thrilling and disturbing future where machines and humans become one.

In the exhibition’s first chapter, 'Science and Fiction', the robots we grew up with in popular culture are displayed around a darkened space, spotlit like alien species. Here, Star Wars’ R2-D2, Rosie the Robot from The Jetsons and the infallible computer HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey all illustrate how our expectations of robots have been shaped by the media. Other works, such as Eric Pickersgill’s Removed series of portraits, where sitters are asked to recreate their uncommunicative and aloof gestures when holding personal devices, raise questions such as do we really need these devices? And, do we even like them?

This line of questioning continues throughout the exhibition as a way of making visitors re-examine our alarmingly ambivalent attitude to the way in which robots have infiltrated our lives. ‘The technology is there, it will be used so we better learn about it and discuss it rather than leaving it to the big data companies do with it what they want’ explains Kries.

A bright white lab-like space dedicated to robots in the work environment tackles the common fear of robots replacing humans. Here exhibits such as YuMi, a dextrous dual arm robot, highlight the potential for robots to work in close collaboration with humans. Designed to perform repetitive small-part assembly work required for the electronics industry, YuMi is safe enough to use without protective barriers. Meanwhile, Robotlab’s robotic scribe, programmed to constantly write manifestos, raises the question of whether robots could also eventually fulfil intellectual roles in the workplace.

Moving from the workplace into the home environment, a room of care-giving robots and smart objects asks the question ‘Do you want a robot to take care of you?’ Displayed against a flesh-coloured backdrop, existing devices such as the Amazon Echo are showcased alongside conceptual pieces such as Philipp Schmitt, Stephan Bogner and Jonas Voigt’s ‘Raising Robotic Natives’ – a collection of four parenting aids that imagine a world in which domestic robots are ubiquitous. Craned menacingly over a baby’s crib, the ‘Robot Baby Feeder Toolhead’ is an industrial arm equipped with a baby bottle on its grip.

‘Robotics and new technology give us just as much reason to be very excited as to be worried, and we have to look at both,’ says curator Amelie Klein of the exhibition’s tendency to swing between visions of dystopia and utopia. ‘We would really like people to come in with one set of ideas and opinions and leave the exhibition realising that there are both positives and negatives.’

Perhaps no where is this clearer than in the exhibition’s final chapter, ‘Becoming One’, where we see how prosthetics, implantations, exoskeletons and connected homes are all pointing towards a future where humans and machines physically merge. Designer firm Emyl use mirrored plinths that reflect visitors as they move around the space eluding to the blurring of boundaries. At this point, Klein is keen to stress that this future is not hypothetical. ‘It is now that we have to discuss what the repercussions will be, and how we want to deal with this. We live in a physical world that has become connected and smart. This is important for people to realise. It’s now, it’s not that we have to be afraid of something that comes tomorrow, it’s already here.’

The show has been curated by Amelie Klein and designed by Basel-based Emyl

The spectrum of exhibits ranges from industrial robots to installations, 'questioning where the boundary lies between work that can be automated and human creativity'

INFORMATION

’Hello, Robot. Design between human and machine’ is on view until 14 May. For more information, visit the Vitra Design Museum website

ADDRESS

Vitra Design Museum
Charles-Eames-Strasse 2
79576 Weil am Rhein

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

When the designer Dieter Rams was at the height of his creative output – heading a team designing ground-breaking electrical appliances for German manufacturer Braun in the late 1950s – he decided to take up furniture design with a new, little-known company called (at the time) Vitsoe + Zapf. Today, this would be like Apple’s Jony Ive going into partnership with a couple of businessmen in downtown Cupertino to design furniture while working on the iMac, MacBook, iPhone and iPad. You can't help but wonder how on earth he found the time – and why he felt the need to do so.

Rams’ motivation to design furniture wasn't all that surprising. He trained as an interior architect before joining Braun in 1955, initially to redesign some of the company workspaces. While at Braun he soon met and began to work with Bauhaus-trained Hans Hirche, Fritz Eichler and a number of designers from Ulm on the development of a new kind of product language – notably Hans Gugelot, with whom Rams co-designed the legendary 'SK 4' phonograph, nicknamed 'Snow White’s Coffin', from 1956.

Gugelot also designed functional, modular furniture systems, notably the 'M 125' from 1950, one of the early systems of components that could be mixed and matched according to the user’s needs. In the mid-1950s, Braun created its own modular trade fair stand designs, and also showed their appliances together with Knoll International, which produced Mies van der Rohe’s furniture designs, highly popular at the time. Rams, too, was deeply interested in the idea of utilitarian furniture systems, which he saw as a liberation from the straitjacket of tradition.

So, with the blessing of his bosses at Braun, Rams began a collaboration with the company (now simply named Vitsoe), that has continued to this day. He began with a highly utilitarian wall-mounted assembly system called 'RZ 57', the launch of which was quickly followed by the 'RZ 60' (now the '606' universal shelving system) which is still in production today and can, without hesitation, be ranked as one of the most iconic furniture designs of the 20th century. Every single one of Rams’ furniture designs for Vitsoe was conceived as a modular system of one form or another – be it lounge chairs that could be adapted into sofas (the '620' system) or a set of stackable plastic outdoor furniture ('740').

Rams’ designs for his furniture – as well as his appliances for Braun – adhered almost without exception to the maxim of 'good design is as little design as possible'. They are functional in form and 'quietly neutral' in appearance. He rejects 'loudness' in all it’s manifestations. Our furniture, he believes, is there to fit to our needs, not the other way around.

This exhibition, curated by Heng Zhi at the Vitra Design Museum’s gorgeous new Schaudepot building – designed by Herzog & de Meuron – is a fine opportunity to view Rams’ design world in the interior context that he always intended: furniture and appliances as one in a home setting that leaves 'room for the user’s self-expression'.

INFORMATION

’Dieter Rams: Modular World’ is on view until 12 March 2017. For more information, visit the Vitra Design Museum website

ADDRESS

Vitra Design Museum
Charles-Eames-Strasse 2
D-79576 Weil am Rhein

View Google Maps

Creative duo Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec are on a roll, dazzling the domestic design world with their recent projects. Launched in 2015, the Samsung Serif TV showed the brothers' knack for innovation as they merged furniture and electronics – the latter a field that they'd previously left rather untouched. Most recently they explored a new area of play, delving into environmental development with their project 'Rêveries Urbaines (Urban Daydreaming)', currently on view at Zaha Hadid's Fire Station at the Vitra Design Museum in Germany.

A project that began in Brittany earlier this year, the pair were invited to create an exposé of their works, and as usual, they initially refused. After some persuasion, they decided to approach the exhibition in a different manner. ‘We wanted to do something important with a new subject,’ explains Ronan Bouroullec to Wallpaper*. ‘I thought it would be intelligent instead of doing one project, to do a sort of sketch book of ideas, about what we think about cities. Not necessarily about this one [Paris], but different ones too.’

And so began an exploration of urban fantasy, taking shape in the form of 18 architectural maquettes with their futurist ideas for nature-focused cities. The various mock-ups for public spaces include elevated greenery, artistic waterfalls, kinetic relaxation areas and hanging pergolas, all produced as research into recreating the harmony between a city, its architecture and the organic world.

‘I like being out of the comfort zone,’ says Ronan of their first foray into the subject. ‘[The artist] Paul Klee said he would have loved to have painted without knowing so much about the history of painting. We are the same; we grew up in the countryside, we are lucky to travel to different cities but we aren’t knowledgeable about the subject [of urban city development].’

Yet venturing into the unaware works like a charm for the French duo. The models – which draw from natural motifs, mimicking clouds, waterfalls, hanging trees – are not only forward-thinking but nod to the allure of 19th century gardens and parks, all imbued with their characteristic flair.

When asking Ronan if they envision these concepts as the future for city architecture, he replies, ‘I think this is the question of "the new city" – the question of elegance. The question of beauty in the city is not so much something we speak about, people are concerned more with efficiency. Of course it is important, but here we are talking about the beauty.’

And will any of the beautiful visions of 'urban fiction' be bought to life? The designer was keen to keep it all under wraps, but he did reveal that two of the structures are set to be produced in Miami and Aarhus very soon. Until then, we can continue to gawk at the miniature versions at the Vitra Museum until 22 January 2017.

INFORMATION

’Rêveries Urbaines (Urban Daydreaming)’ is on view until 22 January 2017. For more information, visit the Vitra Design Museum website

ADDRESS

Vitra Design Museum
Charles-Eames-Straße 2
79576 Weil am Rhein

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS