Renny Ramakers is realizing projects that combine virtual technologies and social media with the craft of design to develop new social relations. For more than three decades, the Dutch art historian, critic, and curator has been changing the nature and purpose of design. As co-founder of the Droog Design collective, she has championed the notion of furniture and industrial design as a rethinking of today's world. When Droog first exhibited at the Milan furniture fair in 1993, its assemblies of found materials and witty forms instantly changed the landscape of design. Since then, Ramakers has worked with makers and creators to move beyond slick objects and towards critical projects that open our eyes to our multifaceted realities while offering easy access and great joy to users.
Published for 010 Publisher's twentieth anniversary in 2003, this volume celebrates the publishing vision of Hans Oldewarris and Peter de Winter, 010's founders. Besides hundreds of monographs by and about Dutch architects, 010 has published books on architecture, interior design, photography, industrial design, graphic design and the visual arts. Exhaustively annotated and illustrated, 20 Years 010 provides not only the technical details of each book (size, format, binding) but also the authors, editors, photographers, graphic designers and printers. A brief description of the contents rounds off each entry. Comprehensive indexes give insight into who contributed to which book and in what way. In their introductory essay, Ed Taverne and Cor Wagenaar give a picture of the practice of architectural publishing in the Netherlands during those years.
Moving Objects deals with emotive design: designed objects that demand to be engaged with rather than simply used. If postmodernism depended upon ironic distance, and Critical Design is all about questions, then emotive design runs hotter than this, confronting how designers are using feelings in what they make. Damon Taylor's original study considers these emotionally laden, highly authored works, often produced in limited editions and sold like art – objects such as a chair made from cuddly toys, a leather sofa that resembles a cow, and a jewellery box fashioned from human hair. Tracing the phenomenon back to the 'Dutch inflection' that began with Droog designers like Jurgen Bey and Hella Jongerius, Taylor conducts an analysis of the development of Design Art and looks for its origins in the uncanny explorations of surrealism. Offering a critique of Speculative Design, and an examination of the work of designers such as Mathias Bengtsson, whose work involves 'growing' furniture inside computers, Taylor asks what happens when the tangible melts into the datascape and design becomes a question of mobilities. In this way, Moving Objects examines contemporary issues of how we live with artefacts and what design can do.
This richly illustrated book presents the exhibits and curatorial visions of the 2015 Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (UABB), organized around the theme, Re-Living the City. It highlights the contributions of dozens of international architects, designers and artists, and offers 12 probing, original essays. The projects and essays of UABB 2015, Re-Living the City, criticize the status quo of architecture and urbanism, but they also resist the false dream of designing a perfect city from scratch. Instead, they portray the city as the incremental product of its inhabitants and designers, who provisionally make and remake its fabric through various means at their disposal. Urbanization in the world’s fastest growing regions today has a dual character: officially-sanctioned, large-scale development shadowed by unregulated or ‘informal’ spaces built by disenfranchised migrants. UABB 2015 operates between these poles, seeking alternative paradigms to generate a more sustain- able, equitable, and imaginative urbanity.The principal exhibitions of UABB 2015 include: (1) ‘Radical Urbanism’, curated by Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner (Urban-Think Tank), based on the proposition that the city today is more radical than the architects and planners operating within it; (2) ‘Collage City 3D’, curated by Aaron Betsky, in which artists and architects are asked to create adjacent three-dimensional installations to explore the idea of habitable collage as a mode of urban design; and (3) ‘PRD 2.0’, curated by Doreen Heng Liu, focusing on the need for a more balanced approach to urbanism and architecture in the Pearl River Delta region in southeast China. Liu also offers an account of the renovation of the Shenzhen exhibition venue, the former Dacheng Flour Factory complex. In addition, the book presents the ‘Social City’ online platform and exhibition curated by Renny Ramakers, the ‘Maker Maker’ showcase of contemporary craft, and a series of national, regional, and thematic pavilions. Curatorial essays are complemented by guest essays from international critics, researchers, and practitioners.
Exhibitions have long played a crucial role in defining disciplinary histories. This fascinating volume examines the impact of eleven groundbreaking architecture and design exhibitions held between 1956 and 2006, revealing how they have shaped contemporary understanding and practice of these fields. Featuring written and photographic descriptions of the shows and illuminating essays from noted curators, scholars, critics, designers, and theorists, As Seen: Exhibitions that Made Architecture and Design History explores the multifaceted ways in which exhibitions have reflected on contemporary dilemmas and opened up new processes and ways of working. Providing a fresh perspective on some of the most important exhibitions of the 20th century from America, Europe, and Japan, including This Is Tomorrow, Expo '70, and Massive Change, this book offers a new framework for thinking about how exhibitions can function as a transformative force in the field of architecture and design.
