Posted by
core jr | 29 Oct 2010
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The Vienna Design Week is an annual design festival that takes place in various locations of the Austrian capital. Organised and curated by Neigungsgruppe Design, Vienna became a design platform with an emphasis on "international but local," with a number of exhibitions, talks and workshops by designers and artists from Central and Eastern Europe. Core77 contributor Jess Charlesworth took a whirlwind tour earlier this month—you may have noticed her series of follow-up posts here. Peep this gallery for an even more on-the scenes look.
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mischer'traxler with their Relumine prototype lamp for Bulb Fiction, top, and their Till You Stop automated cake icing machine in action, pictured bottom. Photo credit: kollectiv fischka
The Vienna based design studio mischer'traxler are so super prolific, that during Vienna Design Week they showed work in at least three exhibitions, exhibition the Till You Stop - How Much is Enough cake icing machine at Design Criminals, the first prototype of the 'Relumine' lamp at Bulb Fiction, 'Nespresso Battery' for the Nespresso Sustain.Ability competition, and the Rumkugelbahn installation in the MAKshop.
Despite their busy design week schedule, we managed to catch up with Katharina Mischer and Thomas Traxler to discuss cakes, rumkugelbahns, compromise and collaborations.
The Rumkugelbahn - The Rumballrun by mischer'traxler. Photo credit: kollectiv fischka
Core77: How did the Rumkugelbahn come about for Vienna Design Week?
Mischer'Traxler: Actually the Rumkugelbahn is old work that we originally did for the DMY Berlin this year. In the installation are different pieces of work by designers and manufacturers from Vienna., created during previous Vienna Design Weeks. It is actually an exhibition display to promote and advertise the Vienna Design Week, to encourage people to come and visit.
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The Varnish Table, top and the FX10 Stripped, pictured bottom.
For Vienna Design Week's Passionswege, Graz-based White Elephant design lab collaborated with Neue Wiener Werkstatte &mdash an established, family-run furniture and upholstery business based in Styria, Austria &mdash to create five furniture pieces based on the techniques used in the company's workshops, breaking open upholstered furniture and making poetry out of the production process.
At their opening, we spoke with Tobias Kestel, one half of White Elephant, who provided some insights into the lab's collaboration with NWW. He discussed time capsules, inner voids, stalactites, seeing the world from the Moon and the future of the industrial designer.
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Top, mischer'traxler's automated cake decoratorfor their 'till you stop - how much is enough' exhibit and bottom, one of its finished cakes. Photo: mischer'traxler
Curated by Sam Jacob, British architect, designer and director of FAT, the Design Criminals Or a New Joy Into The World exhibition is situated in the Design space of the MAKVienna and co-organised by Thomas Geisler, one of the founding members of Neigungsgruppe Design.
A selection of young designers from Austria were invited to create new works based on the Adolf Loos' 'Ornament and Crime' discourse written by the Austrian architect in 1908. In his essay, Loos explains that ornamentation can have the effect of causing objects to go out of style and become obsolete. Loos saw it was a 'crime' to waste the effort needed to add ornamentation, when the ornamentation would cause the object to soon go out of style. The exhibition title refers to this ambivalent debate about ornament and decoration and how the surface has become a form of cultural expression that conveys personal and social agendas.
As a way to explore this debate the selected graphic designers, product designers and architects focused on exploring the potential for ornament in more everyday and anonymous design activities such as cake decorating, hair dressing, tattoing and floristry.
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Studio Olgoj Chorchoj's Back to the Childhood giant dining table installation.
Studio Olgoj Chorchoj were commissioned to create a new piece of work for the Liechtenstein's Museum's exhibition, 'Baroque Splendour and Stainless Steel. Table Culture with a Past and a Future' (see earlier post about Studio Makkink and Bey's Silver Sugar Spoon installation for this exhibit)
Their installation, Back to the Childhood, explores the feeling of what it might be like to be a child by displaying a wooden dining table with drinking glasses and other tableware enlarged to twice its size, thus creating a differentiation in scale which positions an adult at the vantage point of a six year old. As you walk up to the table you can just about see the objects on the table surface adding to the sense of remoteness and mystery.
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Vandasye, top, in front of their concept store installation, pictured bottom.
A nice concept for the Passionswege component of Vienna Design week (see earlier post about Mark Braun's collaboration with J&L Lobmeyr) brought Vandasye to work with Dietmar Sulzberger at his clockmaking shop, Chronometrie Sulzberger.
Georg Schnitzer and Peter Umgeher of Vandasye—a product design studio based in Vienna—saw the potential to turn Mr. Sulzberger's specialised and solitary shop in the Hernals neighbourhood into a network concept store whereby other Viennese manufacturers and merchants can also sell their high quality products and, in doing so, attract new customers.
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Top: What if you put a toy gun into the Utopian world of a snowglobe? Bottom: How many Eiffel Towers does it take to make a memory?
As part of the Passionswege component of Vienna Design Week, Julia Landsiedl, a designer based in Vienna with an eye for storytelling and creating playful products worked with Erwin Perzy's Original Wiener Schneekugeln - the original snow globe makers based in Vienna.
Julia created experiments based on the story of the originator of the SchneeKugeln, Erwin Perzy, and how he came about inventing and making this Utopian world in the snow. With her 'Wunderliche Kugelkammer' [Fantastic Global Curio Cabinet] Julia explored the origins of Baroque curiosity cabinets and our desire to conserve and restore our memories. She questioned the psychological meanings behind these lucky charms and asked poetic questions with her experiments.
What kind of Utopian world exists in the snow globe? Do these snow globes encapsulate our hopes and fears? What 'ingredients' are needed to make a snow globe popular and collectible?
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The development of the Everybody's Bench
At the beginning of the Vienna Design week, Milan-based collective Esterni began a ten-day intervention on the streets of Vienna. Specialising in developing cultural exchange projects in public spaces since 1995, Esterni took over the Palffygasse in the Hernals district of Vienna and created, with Patrick Hubmann, Everybody's Bench.
Everybody's Bench is a public design intervention aimed at creating a public arena to stimulate the exchange of new ideas. It will consist of a long wooden bench that will eventually extend all along the Palffygasse, offering people a place to sit, relax, rest, organise small presentations, exhibit their own projects, live, and enjoy the public space.
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One example of the silver tableware sets originally sketched out in sugar
Studio Makkink & Bey were asked by Vienna Design Week to create new work for an exhibition on table culture entitled 'Baroque Splendour and Stainless Steel. Table Culture with a Past and a Future.'
They proposed tableware and products in answer to the Habsburg valuables found in the Imperial Silver Collection at the Liechtenstein Museum—a museum exhibiting masterpieces covering five centuries of European art from the collections of Prince Hans-Adam II of Liechtenstein. The show is staged in the special exhibition galleries of the museum until 15th November 2010.
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Mark Braun, a designer based in Berlin, collaborated with J&L Lobmeyr as part of the Vienna Design Week's Passionswege - an initiative to bring emerging designers to work directly with local Viennese manufactures or retailers and create on-the-spot experimental projects and interventions.
Braun spent a few months working with the glassmakers and engravers of Lobmeyr to explore the possibilities of creating a functional product that would also comment on its value. As he explains in the video he worked with the copper wheel engraving technique - a long traditional technique used to personalise glass object at Lobmeyr - to realise a series of water carafes that each have been decorated with the outlines of 21 Austrian lakes, rivers, and glaciers. The sum total of these substances together represent the ultimate symbol of the essential wealth of everyday life.
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The majority of the events and exhibitions on show here in Vienna during its design week are set in beautifully historic buildings that have been designed in the 19th or early 20th century by (in)famous architects such as Adolf Loos, Josef Hoffman, Otto Wagner or Gottfried Semper.
You Take a Seat, I Take a Picture by Helmut Palla is set in the breathtakingly huge exhibit space at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts Atelierhaus which used to be the Semperdepot, built by Gottfried Semper and Karl Hasenauer. From 1874 through 1877 it served as a backdrop for theatrical stages.
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Klaus Engelhorn, host of Bulb Fiction, tries on POLKA's 'Perlenlicht' prototype for size.
In the Hernals neighborhood of Vienna, we visited the Bulb Fiction show at the Klaus Engelhorn Depot, a location run by Klaus Engelhorn and Michael Turkiewicz for the past 3 years. Curated by Michael Turkiewicz from designandart.at and Gabriele Ruff, selections of lighting objects from the late 1960s to the early 1970s were exhibited amongst a range of newly commissioned and contemporary lighting designs by various designers from the present day.
A selection of Vienna-based designers were asked to create a light source loosely based on the question, 'What will happen to lamp designs when incandescent bulbs run out?,' suggesting the impending demise of the incandescent lamp and its transition to the energy saving variety.
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To celebrate the release of Austrian based print magazine Kursiv's 2010 yearbook based on the Die 7 Todsunden (The 7 Deadly Sins) the well established Das Mobel furniture store in Vienna commissioned seven designers to create their own interpretations of one of the seven cardinal sins.
Robert Ruf's contribution, pictured above, was based on the sin of Pride - a lamp that shines only on to itself!
Pscyhe, 2010 by Ulrike Lienbacher
At ak7's Contemporary Design by Contemporary Artists, International artists collaborate with Tyroloean craftsmen to create a limited number of objects. Very much a show that discusses the growing trend in contemporary design where boundaries between art objects and designed products continue to blur.
Eero explaining the method of creating durapulp.
One of the first talks of Vienna Design Week was by Eero Koivisto, one of three partners of Claesson Koivisto Rune, a Stockholm based architecture and design practice that was founded almost 17 years ago.
Based in the Kunsthalle, the hub of the design festival, and part of Design Week Laboratory talks, Koivisto shared the ups and downs of designing and developing products. He introduced a number of past projects from their portfolio illustrating the breadth and depth of experiments, prototypes, and manufacturing successes and failures that go into developing any new product.
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In collaboration with designforum Wien, Dyson celebrates 10 years of Dyson Austria with an exhibition detailing the whole Dyson range since the Ballbarrow, including his new air multiplier. Other highlights are cardboard prototypes and models sliced open to reveal the ways he and his huge R&D team have developed innovative air suction/flow patent.
Posted by
Lisa Smith | 30 Sep 2010
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It's one design week after another these days, with London and Valencia just wrapping up and Vienna's 10-day program starting tomorrow. If you're there, don't miss it (though there are so many things going on, you'd have to be a complete recluse to avoid it). If you're not there, not to worry—we've sent Core77 correspondent Jessica Charlesworth to send us the best.
Check out the full program here, and stay tuned at www.core77.com/vienna!
Posted by
Lisa Smith | 14 Sep 2010
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Vienna Design Week is coming up in the first ten days of October, with an exciting calendar of talks, exhibitions, parties, workshops and more. They've recently published the full program to their new website; head over there when you're ready for a comprehensive bout of planning.
In the meantime, click the jump for a few highlights.
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FRIEZE ART FAIR NEW YORK 2012
MILAN 2012: SALONE INTERNAZIONALE DEL MOBILE
MILAN 2012: SATELLITE EXHIBITIONS
MILAN 2012: BRERA DESIGN DISTRICT
