LAYOUT

a great little book that looks at graphic layouts. here are a couple pleasing examples...

BERLIN ASIDE ARCHITECTURE

From Kenny Cuper's Spaces of Uncertainty : "To think about the identity of a city is to think about the collection of sites and spaces that together signify this city. It is at the opposite end from identifying the city with big stories, architects, historic characters, or any such clearly identifiable influences. The identities of a city lie in its struggle to administer its everyday activities. It is the very moment in which the institutionalized whole is overruled by the everyday, that immediate identities are born. Berlin demands that one thinks about the unconscious opposition between space and place, site and project. The latter is produced by the narrative practices in which architecture plays an important role. Architects like to foresee future identity. They rarely seem to look at the present nature of a site, of the city."

"An architectural plan or project is generally a projection of a site. It is a story about a space that thereby turns it into a place. In contrast, immediate identity is about the sense of the spaces that make up the city, not about all of the projections that try to tie its identity down for the sake of a singular story. Immediate identity seems to exist through the temporary use of ill-defined sites. Sites without projects. In this sense, Berlin's identity is merely a shadow of architecture, despite all attempts to construct its identity through architecture and ideological urbanism. Berlin shows how the identity of a city is not in its architecture, but next to it. Aside architecture, we can hear the whispering voice of societies, the memories and predictions differing from one another without categorization. They inhabit the vagueness of every future moment that does not exclude questions but allows for a multiplicity of immediate response."

BACKSTAGE IN BERLIN

http://www.functionalfate.org/archives/2009/11/03/kurt-cobain-photographed-by-juergen-teller/

QUARTIER 206, BERLIN

www.functionalfate.org

GDR DESIGN

A good overview of East German design is offered here .

"During the initial phase of the GDR, product design was dominated by an official Stalinist aesthetic, but the ideology of Stalinism proved terribly unsuited for the postwar world. It relegated the needs of consumers to dead last on the priority list, demanding sacrifice in all areas of life in the interest of building heavy industry based only on primary and secondary production. clothes, toys, household items, and cars were all considered by the SED party to be wants, not needs.

The regime had been against modernism, it favored historicism in product design, and thus was initially against the use of plastic because of its modern aesthetic. the products of socialist industry and construction should reflect the cultural heritage of
germany, imitating styles such as baroque, rococo, chippendale, ‘gründerzeit’, and others...."



"When the population exerted pressure on the party to abandon its anti-formalist stance and adopt a version of practical functionalism in design, the SED had to back off its anti-bauhaus line. ‘national in form, socialist in content’ was then the official party slogan for how to produce goods. plastics came to symbolize the practical, and valuable rather than the cheap and disposable. It was largely because of this that plastics came to be seen in the GDR by the majority of the population as a quality material and a sign of technological progress, not a cheap imitation.
there was a general acceptance and even pride in the clever use of it to make socialism work even when resources were tight."

See, also, this rather cheeky article from the Guardian about cold war design: "The West Germans coped with increasing prosperity by applying Bauhaus design principles to consumer goods: Dieter Rams's austerity for Braun electrical products would only have been acceptable in a culture where alternatives were becoming available. Meanwhile, the Ossis (East Germans) had trouble making enamel buckets. Soviet-sector product design was charmingly bad. The Soyuzelektropribor television receiver had wobbly legs and loose knobs. That's if you could receive television."

OMAR AKBAR - MODERNISM DESTROYS URBAN FABRIC

Article about the battle over the "Ghosts of Bauhaus" from a 2002 edition of New York Times and an even better one in Metropolis Magazine

"An irreverent, humorous urban planner, Akbar wants the new Bauhaus to effect social change. He has developed planning projects as far flung as the slums of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and the favelas of Rio de Janiero. His newest effort is an international building exhibition that he hopes will lead to the transformation of cities in the former East Germany, where planners are facing a new, severe problem of shrinking populations and empty buildings.

"The buildings here don't have people anymore," Akbar said. "We are trying to be creative and look at this as an opportunity rather than shrinkage. We want to involve the inhabitants, investors, scientists and economists." He added; "It is the ultimate test of less is more," referring to the mantra of the Bauhaus philosophy coined by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe."

"...From 1919 to 1933, Germany was the hotbed of design, and a grouping of visionaries — Gropius and his successor, Mies van der Rohe, and the artists Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Oskar Schlemmer, among others — started a revolution of sleek simplicity in everything from stacking chairs and lamps to stairwells and big buildings. They were the pioneers of clean design for a new century, an age of mass production and technology. Initially inspired by handicraft and textiles, the modernists later emphasized reason and science in architecture as well as social responsibility in planning..."

"...The Nazis considered the Bauhaus to be socialist in nature, and the communists considered it bourgeois. What started in Germany and became the basis for architecture and interiors around the world was for all intents and purposes abandoned here in what became East Germany. The fall of the Berlin Wall led to a re-examination of and a renewed interest in the Bauhaus..."

"... Born in Afghanistan to an aristocratic family — his grandfather advised King Mohammed Zaher Shah's father — Akbar moved to Germany as a child when his father was offered a scholarship to study, and he was raised by his German stepmother.

Akbar thinks his name and heritage do not help him. "My name is a problem. I have nothing directly to do with the history of Germany, and it wasn't my Bauhaus." His critics refer to him loosely as a Turk, Iranian or Arab. Most important, he said, they do not see him as German and he is not a modernist. "Not a day goes by when we don't receive a letter or e-mail voicing some discontent," he said, noting that much of it involves personal attacks on him. He has tired of the maelstrom, but "no one can keep me from talking," he said."

"He is candid about what he calls Gropius's autocratic style and the ways in which classical modernist principles, such as pushing entry ways to the side of large, single-use structures, "destroyed the quality of the urban fabric."

"OSTALGIE"

Denny Lee had this say about Berlin aesthetics in a 2009 travel report for the New York Times : "Clunky Trabants belching car exhaust along Karl-Marx-Allee. Red-and-yellow East German flags fluttering from storefronts. Retro-chic bars that resemble cold-war bomb shelters. The Berlin Wall may have fallen 20 years ago next month, but in certain pockets of this pulsating German capital, it seems to be going back up – at least for those too young to recall what life was like in the German Democratic Republic. From stylish hotels that resemble 1970s Soviet housing to boutiques that elevate kitschy East German goods to high design, Berlin is still divided – on whether the Iron Curtain was cool. There’s even a German word for it, “ostalgie,” a combination of the words “ost” (east) and “nostalgie” (nostalgia)."

And from Time Magazine in 2009: Or take a look at Leipzig's Museum Runde Ecke , another Stasi base that is now an authentically preserved museum filled with examples of how East German society was controlled. They are enough to cure any misplaced notion of the D.D.R. as a place where life was badly dressed but somehow simpler and more virtuous. "I sympathize with the idea of Ostalgie," says Irmtraut Hollitzer of the citizens' committee that established the Museum Runde Ecke. "But the Stasi museum is meant to help people remember the queues, the decay, the waiving of freedom to travel, the Wall. It gives an insight into what happens when democracy and freedom are missing."

MISCELLANEOUS

I might have found the perfect camera: The Lubitel 166, a Russian single-lens reflex camera. As an analog it gives warm colours and blurs the frame edges, but elsewhere gives detail -- retro but not too much. Check out Lubitel on flickr.

I started a systematic literature research of german literature on the topic and created an endnote-file. Do you use this software? I need you to send me some questions, preferably questions concerning history, politics and sociology, that might be important for our project. I will be in my university library tomorrow and could get a lot of literature there.

There's a book about an exhibition in the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris in 1979: "Paris, Berlin 1900-1933, conformances and differences"; there's a chapter about industrial design and everyday objects. It might be helpful to compare the then existing perceptions of conformances and differences to our own perception. It's in german: I will check it out.

Another book that caught my attention is about the restructuring of East-Berlin in the 1990s. It might contain some arguments about the "cultural annexation" of East-Berlin by the West-German alternative and artistic culture: "Die Restrukturierung des Raumes" (Restructuring Space). Since we need to know more about the emergence of the particular Berlin coffeehouse culture...

MUSEUM DER DINGE

Check out the Museum der Dinge "Since the 1979s the WBA-MDD [has been] collecting objects with design-historic significance as well as archive material and objects to document modern everyday life characterized by commodity culture. Presently the museum has a relevant collection of about 25.000 objects.

At a former factory building the museum presents itself in the fashion of an open depot, offering to its visitors an area of more than 500 m² to explore directly the museums practise in dealing with the collections. The objects are combined in model collections, illustrating for one thing the basics of Werkbund aims, for another thing common aspects of the material, functional, formal and utilitarian history of the things in the 20th century and contemporary product culture. The exhibits are contrasted in combinations full of potential: objects of well-known designers and anonymous creations, functional, puristic objects and so called “taste aberrations” or “Kitsch”, substantial “honest” objects and surrogate materials, trademark and no-name products."

This exhibition I would like to see in November:

"In 1957, Hirche’s furniture was found in many apartments in Berlin’s Hansaviertel development as part of the Interbau building exhibition. His unpretentious works were also shown at the Milan Triennale, the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels and the 1964 Documenta, exemplifying the new West German product culture propagated by the Deutsche Werkbund. These objects went abroad as the ambassadors of a young, democratic, better Germany. After 1945, the Werkbund was chiefly concerned with the reconstruction of cities destroyed by war, the establishment of a contemporary residential style, and the quality of industrial mass production, which was now becoming ubiquitous."

Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge
Oranienstraße 25
D-10999 Berlin

MANGUM

Check out MANGUM "The hackarchitect believes that since architecture isn't able to answer the many issues that a city has to face nowadays, we should raise and 'make the city ourselves'.

In 2007, Carbera created MANGUM, an independent agency of digital media and urban activism. While MANGUM pays homage to MAGNUM it also differentiates himself radically from the photographic cooperative by encouraging a more bottom-up approach in which the very people who were so far only the subject of photos must now be recognized as critical actors.

MANGUM seeks to build an urban culture characterized by action and critique, to find opportunities in underused or intermediary spaces, to inhabit public space. The members of MANGUM believe that interacting with the city is an important form of daily communication that shouldn't be left in the sole hands of artists, activists and architects. They believe that a city is produced day by day through critical encounters, relationships, actions and events."

CAPITAL OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

"With the study of the arcades, a closely related reorientation in space is opened up. The street itself is thereby manifest as well-worn interior: as living space of the collective, for true collectives as such inhabit the street. The collective is an eternally awake, eternally agitated being that—in the space between the building fronts—lives, experiences, understands, invents as much as individuals do within the privacy of their own four walls. For it, for this collective, enameled shop signs are a wall decoration as good as, if not better than, the inexpensive olegraph above the hearth. Walls with their “Post no Bills” are its writing desks, newspaper stands its libraries, display windows its glazed inaccessible armoires, mailboxes its bronzes, benches its bedroom furniture, and the café terrace is the balcony from which it looks down on its household…”

FRIEDRICHSHAIN FLEAMARKET

Demonstrating the accessibility of chairs in Berlin to Berliners, here was an impressive display of possible options. The chairs had gathered there on a Sunday afternoon. Around the time people were wandering to the market or park after brunch.

MACHINE / RHIZOME

A good way of phrasing or framing things from my friend Justin: "I wonder how one could think through the chair as a machine for living/meaning-making (Corbusier/D&G) and as a rhizome (different chairs, different locations, rooted to their cafe and with a provenance unknown to the user)." Machine/Rhizome, Army/Family...

ONE AND THREE CHAIRS

The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 257

A chair sits alongside a photograph of a chair and a dictionary definition of the word chair. Perhaps all three are chairs, or codes for one: a visual code, a verbal code, and a code in the language of objects, that is, a chair of wood. But isn't this last chair simply . . . a chair? Or, as Marcel Duchamp asked in his Bicycle Wheel of 1913, does the inclusion of an object in an artwork somehow change it? If both photograph and words describe a chair, how is their functioning different from that of the real chair, and what is Kosuth's artwork doing by adding these functions together? Prodded to ask such questions, the viewer embarks on the basic processes demanded by Conceptual art.

"The art I call conceptual is such because it is based on an inquiry into the nature of art," Kosuth has written. "Thus, it is . . . a working out, a thinking out, of all the implications of all aspects of the concept 'art,' . . . Fundamental to this idea of art is the understanding of the linguistic nature of all art propositions, be they past or present, and regardless of the elements used in their construction." Chasing a chair through three different registers, Kosuth asks us to try to decipher the subliminal sentences in which we phrase our experience of art.

FROM MARTIN'S PAINTING

CROWNING A PIECE OF PLASTIC

Martin likes the monobloc chair because he recognizes elements of crown and throne in it, which are also present in his pharoah prints. My associations: the monobloc integrates royal elements with a cheap mass-product. Here we have the meeting of singularity and universality that Meagan spoke of. The Monobloc is interesting to us not only from an art-history point of view: from Beuys "everybody is an artist" ("jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler") to "everybody is a king"? (euphemistic, i am afraid)

CHAIR CONVERSATIONS

I have been talking a lot about chairs lately, and the following interesting ideas have come up in conversation. I would like to preface this statement by saying these ideas are not my own; a small adoption in the hopes of good upbringing.

- I asked a fellow student about the tension between the singularity in authorship of design, and the creation of a universal type that would then be infinitely reproduced and universally applied to any situation. (relating to stephanie's previous comment about Bauhaus industrial design). The student agreed that there does seem to be a kind of disjunction between these two ideas -- maybe partially due to the fact that Bauhaus evolved out of an arts and crafts era (craftsman creating singular, unique products) yet wanted to embrace new production methods and utopian ideals of it's time (universalism) -- but that maybe this tension was productive.

- productive is an interesting word. Productive how? It certainly created a standard for most industrial design that we see today. It affectively created a more readily available type that could then be used as an agent for style and of course, taste. Distinction. But if you don't have this, if you cannot relegate a spatial situation to one type or another (as is the case with the Berlin family of chairs, over Paris's army) what does that say about taste? Free play as opposed to militant conformity?

GENESIS

A field study

Most of the coffee shops and bars in Berlin`s alternative and trendy neighbourhoods, from the early nineties until now, were opened by individuals without much seed capital. Therefore those people had to improvise. They asked their friends about where to find old furniture or went to flea markets or the junkyard. The dealers in the flea markets I spoke with today told me that many west German public authorities, institutions, and churches (see the stamp “Sportamt Spandau”- office for sports in Berlin-Spandau – these chairs originate from a multifunctional gymn) used to change their whole inventory every 20 years or so and gave the respective furniture either to charity organisations, which in turn either used the furniture themselves, sold it, or dumped it in junkyards, where resourceful dealers found, restored and resold them.

The above-named practical reasons for resorting to cheap recycled chairs joined forces with the growing individualism of post reunification Berlin. Coffee shops now attracted customers by their very own and unique constellation of different styles (this might have been the case for west-Berlin before, which has always been preferred by punks, alternatives and others who run away from military service; but was new for the former socialist part of the city. It was the beginning of the cultural occupation of east-Berlin). One of the dealers gave me an appealing thought: a customer can not only have his favourite coffee shop, but also his favourite, unique and therefore easy recognizable, chair (in a place packed with No.14s, you can only have your favourite table), which might in turn finally win over the customer.) Werner Aisslinger, the designer of the Michelsberger Hotel, said in this context, that the typical Berlin-style stands out as poetic minimalism meeting improvisation and recycling.

MORE CHAIRS

I could envision an entire chapter (or section) about this chair. I bet it's everywhere in Berlin (Martin, I recall, has one in his painting...)

MONOBLOC ARTICLE

Gabriel, the Times article you posted is very helpful; closer to some of the things we have been talking about:

"What's the world's most famous chair? One of those curvy Thonet café chairs? Mies van der Röhe's elegant Barcelona chair? Verner Panton's sexy S-shaped Panton chair? The electric chair? A throne?

Wrong. It's neither an icon from the design history books, nor a symbol of political power, but one of the cheap plastic chairs that you can buy for a few euros, and spot just about everywhere, usually in white. Like most truly ubiquitous objects, they're so familiar that we barely notice them, but more people all over the world have seen — and sat on — one of those chairs, than any other.

Just think about how many there are in schools, bars, hospitals, parks, beaches, sports stadiums and retirement homes. And how often they appear as props in global dramas. Floating in the debris of the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. Seating thousands of people at Cuban political rallies. Lurking in the hideout where Saddam Hussein was captured, and in Abu Ghraib prison."

SELLING OLD CHAIRS

Berlin students are selling old chairs to finance projects | Germany | Deutsche Welle | 06.03.201

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,5324527,00.html

Desperate for more financial resources, student activists at Berlin's Humboldt University are currently turning old auditorium chairs into money by selling individual seats to alumni. DW-WORLD.DE: German and European news, analysis and multimedia from Deutsche Welle - in 30 languages

(if this link doesn't work - for some reason I am having problems with it - google chairs of Berlin)

WHITE BILLION CHAIRS 33 BY TINA ROEDER

Has anyone been to the Appel Design Gallery in Mitte?

FACTORY SALES

Where do you think we could find out more information about these factory sales after reunification? The second-hand, industrial aesthetic must certainly be linked to these industrial "sellouts."

I also wonder what Bauhaus would think of re-using or re-contextualizing an object; moving it, for example, from the factory into the street, or from school into a private lounge? Gropius, I think, would not endorse this admixture because it means overlooking the elements of function, which are all tied to a notion of an object's context:

• Simplicity
  
• Symmetry
  
• Angularity
  
• Abstraction
  
• Consistency
  
• Unity
  
• Organization
  
• Economy
  
• Subtlety
  
• Continuity
  
• Regularity
  
• Sharpness
  
• Monochomaticit

Or maybe he would? I'm thinking back to Meagan's quote about the difference between modernism and Bauhaus, primarily that Bauhaus designs the object "for any setting." In isolating the form, the designer attempts to universalize it, which does permit, though maybe not endorse, the re-using of a factory floor chair in a cafe setting. (and, of course, we should think about the patent wars that went on with Bauhaus design too as an example of an re-attachment to singularity despite the proclamation of universality).

MORE CHAIRS

Picture 1 and 2 show chairs from either school (I remember the black ones being in our classroom for music-lessons at high-school, whereas Timm thinks they are design classics) or factory context. You can easily picture the brown ones in a break room for factory-workers (in the screw-factory, where I used to work, there where heaps of them).
I think this second hand/bulky waste/ fleamarket-phenomenon in Berlin used to be anti-bourgeois and was based on the sellout of entire factories, schools and other institutions formerly owned by the east german government after the fall of the wall. I just recently talked to a dealer who had specialised in industrial-styled lamps- those sellouts where a gold-mine back then...

LOOSE THOUGHTS

"For Frank Lloyd Wright, harmony was the key. Like the Arts and Crafts architects of the early 20th century, he custom-designed his furnishings for the spaces they would occupy. In contrast, Modernist designers reached for universality. They wanted to design furniture that could fit in any setting" (ie. bauhaus)

"A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous."
--Mies van der Rohe, In Time magazine, February 18, 1957

* chippendale saw cabinet-making (furniture making) as a gentleman's art, the chair, therefore was an expression of the refinement of taste.

digicoll library


about.com/chairs

FROM PARIS

THONET CHAIR

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/8/view/9335/thonet-chair-no-214-150-years.html

No. 14

Michael Thonet designed this cafe/bistro chair in the 19th century. It is easily the most mass-produced and best-selling chair ever: cheap, easily reproducible, assembled and packaged. (Ubiquitous in almost all Parisian cafes, and pretty much absent in Berlin). Here's an article on the chair from the NYtimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/arts/10iht-design10.1.17621906.html?_r=1

And a blog devoted to it: http://www.chairblog.eu/category/chair-designer/michael-thonet/

GROUPS (July 2010)

Chairs (F -- street and hotel)