Stan Engelbrecht and Nic Gobler on their ride across South Africa.

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The call for adventure is often triggered by a question. The story of Stan Engelbrecht—a 36 year old with an Afrikaans accent and the words Je Comprends (I understand in French) tattooed on his right forearm—is one that looks for the answer to the disjointed past of South Africa.

South Africa is car country, and the relative ubiquity of bicycles in most countries is completely absent here, the reasons are linked to its dreary racial past. “Five years ago I would ride a whole week around Cape Town without seeing a single other bike, when you do see a bike you almost want to say ‘Hey! Come here!’” Engelbrecht said.  When Stan met Nic Grobler, they asked themselves “Why are bikes not a thing here? It would make so much sense, especially with the really bad public transport” they headed out and decided to interview and photograph any cyclists they could find.

Kleinbooi Kabinde "I make broomsticks. I am from KwaMhlanga in KwaNdebele and I am from the Ndebele royal family. Now I am in Boksburg, working hard so that my children will have something to eat. I got this bicycle from my former boss, who felt compassion for me and gave it to me."

As this trial run became routine, and 2 interviews became 40, they raised money through Kickstarter and went on an adventure, pushing boundaries, riding well over 10 000 km’s. The result is a book on South African biking culture and an attempt at answering the question “why no bikes?” Engelbrechts’s opinion on the matter is that “White people drove cars, and they always had enough disposable income to buy their children cars. It was almost considered punishment for white kids to ride a bike to school. When bicycles became more common in the late 60’s, white people wouldn’t be caught dead on one because ‘that’s something a black person does.’ So there was a political distinguishment made as to who rides a bicycle and who doesn’t. At the end of apartheid, black people felt empowered and they wanted what the whites always had which was a car. Now there’s a stigma amongst black people that if you’re poor you ride a bicycle. People were of a mindset that they would rather walk than ride.”

After two years, Stan and Nic photographed almost everyone they came across with a bicycle, the total was a relatively small number of 500 portraits. A third of the portraits were made into three books (featured here), called Bicycle Portraits and were accompanied with a short interview of each individual featured. “You definitely draw attention, because so few people ride, everyone stares, points and laughs. It’s not malicious, it’s just surprising to them so people react,” said Engelbrecht.

Asher Tafara "I travel with the bike to get herbs and medicines on the mountains. I do healing of the people and sell medicines for a living."

John Jacobs "I've been riding for 12 years and I enjoy it. This is my 10th bicycle. Every winter I have to pawn my bicycle at the pawn shop because I don't have work, then when I get money again I go fetch my bike."

Shortly after Bicycle Portraits was published, Stan and Nic were asked to speak at a local Ted talk. They were able to fly a few people to the conference that had been featured in the book; none of them had ever met each other. “We got this cool young black hipster guy that rides a fix-gear bike to meet an 83 year old British ex pat that’s lived in Johannesburg her entire life and still commutes by bike every day, they were comparing scars!” adding that “If an 83 year old can speak on equal ground with a 27 year old then that’s great!”

Vernon Versveld "I ride my bicycle because it is the cheapest way of transport. I would say the bicycle is really my whole life, because wherever I go, I go on this bicycle."

While South Africa remains one of the most dynamic economies of the African continent, its wounds are still open. Engelbrecht’s frustration with people clinging to preconceived notions has pushed him to lead this uphill battle.

“I hope my book has had some influence but I don’t want to call myself a pioneer. But it can be done. I just renovated my house and I did everything on my bike. So much is possible and it’s actually much quicker. Riding a bike is better for you, for your mind, you know all that shit people always say. It’s all true even if it does sound like a cliché.”

Bicycle Portraits – Stephanie Baker from Bicycle Portraits on Vimeo.

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Zogmayer’s text-based works represent the basis of his artistic practice. His strategy takes words and aphorisms that are themselves central to contemporary experiences, in art and in life, decontextualizing and subverting them in sculptural forms to encourage a new approach to their meaning.

His JETZT Watch series is a poignant example of his approach. In 2000, Zogmayer created a large-scale permanent installation in the Ottakring neighbourhood of Vienna. On raised concrete, the text sculpture lies horizontally at an incline to the building in front of it, spelling out the word JETZT (now). The artwork evokes both a feeling of peace and contemplation, seamlessly weaving into the landscape around it while boldly encouraging a moment’s pause. Reminiscent of the landscaped interior of a cloistered garden, two trees planted within the text augment the idea of NOW the word aims to express: to consider the nature of time by studying our concept of the present.

The Power of Now

Why now? To the artist, the concept of now is maligned in our daily lives: “Time is always breathing down our necks. Many of us feel to always be running out of it, which causes sickness and stress … Of course this is all nonsense we bring upon ourselves, because time is always there – without interruption.”

To this end, Zogmayer created the JETZT Watch nearly ten years ago. The watch is a functional artistic object, largely indistinguishable from a regular wristwatch—a black leather armband holds a stainless steel frame, and an internal mechanism performs the normal time-telling function of an analog timepiece. The difference is on the watch face: instead of a circle of numbers indicating the hour, the white face simply says JETZT ,or now, or the equivalent in a number of other languages. As a design object, this minimalist piece explores the concept of the present in our daily lives. Created to encourage mindfulness, the piece expresses the artists’ desire to encourage wearers to live in the now, free of the pressures of the past and future. By means of this verbal intervention into the flow of contemporary life, the wearer is pushed to evaluate their understanding and usage of time.

A New Perception of the Everyday

Much of Zogmayer’s oeuvre is designed to interrogate the intersection between religion and secular life. A recent project, If You Celebrate It, shows the artist’s dedication to exploring this contemporary experience within the familiar, established architectural conventions of the European Catholic church. Over the past 15 years, Zogmayer has worked with architect Thomas N. Pauli to redesign the usage of space within chapels and churches in Austria and Belgium. If You Celebrate It proves that the gulf between the secular art experience in the contemporary world and the traditional practices of organized religion is not as wide as commonly perceived.

The project owes its genesis to a statement by legendary American music pioneer John Cage, who upon being questioned about a 1966 piece by Merce Cunningham, replied: “If you celebrate it, it is art. If you do not, it is not.” Zogmayer’s work opens the door for a consideration of selfless celebrations, challenging the viewer to reconsider their rote experiences and open themselves to a new perception of the everyday.

Text: Tara Dominguez

Images: Jetzt 6

Watch

Leo Zogmayer’s JETZT Watch is available in the MONOQI Shop until the 25th of March, 2013.

Getting to know Berlin used to mean grabbing a standardised travel guide and traipsing around the familiar tourist traps. A better bet for those who want to truly explore the city presents itself in the Berlin Design Guide, an alternative read recently published by freelance journalists and cultural managers Viviane Stappmann and Kristina Leipold, that not only provides a host of helpful pointers on interesting spots and locations but also paints a vivid, contextual portrait of the city and its flourishing creative scene.

After a 14-year stint in Australia and a sojourn in China respectively, Viviane and Kristina arrived in Berlin and were confronted with the task of finding their footing in the bustling capital. The challenge of embracing a constantly changing metropolis with its many opportunities for creatives became an organic research process that both anticipated and spurred their project to create a new kind of guide to Berlin.

‘It’s mostly true that you’re most successful when you do something that you actually enjoy’, says Viviane. And the Design Guide is aimed squarely at people like her and Kristina: tourists or inhabitants of Berlin that are interested in the development of the city around them and its creative scene.

Body and Soul

Asked why they chose an analogue over a digital media, Viviane and Kristina laughingly agree that ‘we’re somewhat old fashioned.’ Firmly centred on the book as a product, the project utilises the physical look-and-feel of the book as well as its ability to convey the nexuses between the city as a whole and its individual locations. When you understand the city as a living organism as they do, it seems logical to pack such information into a physical form capable of stimulating both the mind and the senses. ‘The book fits perfectly into your pocket’, adds Kristina, deftly demonstrating just how comfortably the 264-page publication slides into hers.

The thoughtfulness that went into the final form of the product and the organic development of the project went hand-in-hand with an initial decision to publish a design guide to Berlin, a commitment that Viviane’s experience in Melbourne readily explains. Published in 2006 while she was still based in the city, her guide to the metropolis’ animated design scene was a runaway success, selling out and going into its second printing run within weeks. Having published a second guide (this time for Sydney) and enjoying a similarly enthusiastic response, the huge potential of the concept became clear, an inkling underscored by the constant requests from readers for a design guide to their own home cities.

Flexibility as Maxim

After numerous interviews with every conceivable representative of the city’s creative scene had been conducted and the project’s greatest hurdle, finding sponsors (‘it’s not just a cliché that Berlin is broke’, says Viviane), had been overcome, the duo turned to formatting and design. Divided into easy-to-navigate categories with the aid of a colour-coded index, the book’s chapters on architecture, design, art, fashion, food and drink, and places to stay, offer the discerning visitor a truly aesthetic sense of orientation.

Alongside this thematic division, the Design Guide is also divided into sections focused on particular Kiez, the common Berlin designation for distinctive neighbourhoods clustered around a central thoroughfare. Furnished with a multitude of compact maps offering information and expert tips on carefully chosen tours, hot spots and the world of the creatives who populate them, the guide’s layout overlays the city’s own ‘design’ and fabric. As Viviane and Kristina intended, plans to roll the concept out to include other cities and their design scenes, albeit in a manner that resists uniform templates, are already afoot.

The enthusiasm with which Viviane and Kristina embraced their new home and its characteristic blend of openness to experimentation and freedom is readily apparent. Less a call to ‘consume’ the city in the style of regular guides, their publication shares their fascination with Berlin and makes a case for engagement and immersion while forging a sensibility open to exploring the stories and history beyond the regular tourist attractions. All of that, packaged in an extremely attractive, pocket-sized companion, is exactly what they’ve pressed into our hands with the Berlin Design Guide.

Text: Christina Oswald
Translation: Benjamin Blackbenz
Images: Max Zerrahn, Berlin Design Guide (Layout: Wolfgang, Shlomo & Max), Christina Oswald

The Berlin Design Guide is now available as part of MONOQI’s Berlin Design Bundle.

Edinburgh-born and London-based Scottish designer Catherine Aitken’s experimental work is far removed from traditional tartans and kilts. If there’s one commonality, it’s perhaps that fully-grown men in skirts cut just as unusual a figure as the products created by the 29-year-old designer. Since completing her master’s in textile design at the London RCA in 2011, Aitken, who also studied in Glasgow and Copenhagen, has been breaking the mould of traditional textiles, edging the discipline towards furniture, fabric and interior design.

Material research plays a central role in Aitken’s work, which aims to produce functional objects that bring the relationship they have to their surroundings into focus. Taking a highly practical approach when it comes to form and pattern, Aitken often uses repetition to achieve surprising results that add up to much more than the sum of their parts. Comprising a hexagonal metal frame topped with neatly rowed wooden ‘tiles’, the Hexaform Side Table is a clear example of the possibilities inherent in this approach, a point underscored in Two by Two, a series of square floor panels whose simple motifs can be freely combined to create endless new patterns.

Another of Aitken’s projects, Fade, recently convinced the jury of the Time to Design prize with its experimental feel for form, colour and materiality. The purpose of the prize is to support designers in realising submitted prototypes and after scooping up the award Aitken was given three months in Copenhagen as part of a scholarship programme to commence work at her own discretion on a pet project. Originally conceived of as a collection of lamps, the objects metamorphosed over the course of an open-ended process into a series of stools. Composed of wood, powder-coated steel and two different types of Japanese cord, the stools are finished with a unique progression of colours and patterns that seem to fade into one another.

‘I spent a long time looking for the perfect cords for the project’, says Aitken. The choice came down to two types of Japanese cotton cords in the end, one soft and matt, the other shimmering and delicate. The contrast adds a fascinating allure to these multifunctional, stackable objects and their pairing of vintage charm and modern minimalism. Whether the stools are used for seating, as side tables, or simply as a decorative display stand for a favourite houseplant, it’s hard to resist the impression that Fade is simple perfection.

Text: Christina Oswald
Translation: Benjamin Blackbenz
Images: Catherine Aitken

Catherine Aitken´s Fade stools are available in the MONOQI store until the 22nd of March, 2013.

 

A gifted technical thinker employed before the Second World War on the Trans-Siberian railway, Mikhail Kalashnikov was known for irritating his superiors with incessant questions about how the things around him, especially weapons, functioned. He began sketching his first designs for an automatic assault rifle in 1941 while recovering from the injuries he had sustained as a tank commander during the Soviet Union’s attempts to repel the German invasion commenced earlier that year. His finalised prototype was adopted by the nation’s armed forces in 1947. By the end of the century, over 100 million variants of the Avtomat Kalashnikov model 1947 aka AK47 had been produced, fuelling innumerable conflicts, wars and rebellions around the world.

Design and Use

Reliable, exceptional in its economy and easy to maintain, the gun was murderously effective. As Ian Ferguson and Martin Postler note, ‘if you go by traditional product design values’, weapons like the AK47 ‘are incredibly well designed.’ The fascination that the gun holds for designers is driven by an urge to find the connections between objects, people and ideas. According to Ferguson, objects acquire meaning through use: ‘what’s interesting as a designer is that [guns] force you to think about the fact that an object doesn’t exist on its own; it exists in a big context, in the world, and it’s only through use that it has meaning’.

Objects as Symbols

In a presentation given at the 2011 Belgrade Design Week, Ferguson and Postler created a line of thought that’s long been implicit in their work. Stating that ‘everything comes down to materiality’, the designers noted how ideas of a ‘post industrial’ world obscure the reality of production that now takes place not in the former industrial heartlands of Europe and the US but in Asia.  This preoccupation with transnational connections and exchanges is at the heart of their fascination with the ‘world as it is’.

Postlerferguson – Weapons of Mass Creation from Gestalten on Vimeo.

Weapons have long played a vital role in this international interchange of objects. The ideological shifts in meaning in economic and cultural exchanges of this kind are frequently complex and varied. As the duo notes, the very silhouette of a weapon like the AK47 or the M16, its American alter ego, is laden with symbolic meaning. For some, the Soviet rifle was a byword for the communist threat, for others, it was a means of liberation. In Mozambique, for example, a recent parliamentary debate centred on whether the AK47, the weapon frequently used in the war of independence against Portugal in the 70s, should remain emblazoned on the national flag.

Constructing Meaning

The designers’ keen awareness of the symbolic force of weapons was underscored in an exhibition held in the London Craze Gallery. Ferguson and Postler invited eight designers and artists to customise one of their 1:1 paper models of iconic twentieth century weapons. A number of participants deconstructed the objects entirely, echoing the Biblical verse in which it is commanded that swords be beaten into ploughshares. british artist Ben Wilson meanwhile applied sparkling gold paint to an AK47, playfully drawing attention to the gun’s use in popular culture, where it has been utilised for everything from lamp stands to the names of rappers and vodkas.

That Ferguson and Postler’s work operates on a symbolic plane is most plainly evident in their choice of material: paper, a decision that undermines the lethal premise of the weapons they’ve recreated while simultaneously underscoring the brilliance of their design. Created with experienced crafters in mind, the model kits require patience and perseverance on the part of the builder while the finished product sets the stage for another symbolic transformation.

Paint your paper gun. Display it. Burn it. Whatever you do, remember that paper tigers are only as powerful as the symbols they represent.

Text: Benjamin Blackbenz

Images: Gestalten

PostlerFerguson’s series of 1:1 paper model guns are available courtesy of Gestalten Verlag in the MONOQI shop until the 22nd of March, 2013.

Visual poet and master of modern photography Henri Cartier-Bresson understood that photography was more than a discipline, it was a way of interacting with the world beyond the lens: ‘to take photographs means to recognize – simultaneously and within a fraction of a second – both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one’s head, one’s eye and one’s heart on the same axis.’

The renowned master of the medium understood that a photographer’s goal wasn’t only to capture ‘the decisive moment’, but to step from behind the safety of the camera to encounter the very real, very tangible universe in front of the viewfinder.

Berlin-based brand Photocircle has found a way to make good on Cartier-Bresson’s vision. Combining their shared love of the lightbox, the collective of photography enthusiasts came together to create a truly innovative business model that gives back to the people and the landscapes captured by a photographer. The ingenuity of the Photocircle vision lies in its simplicity: all a photo devotee has to do is upload their quality print to the website for consideration, choose their selling price, and indicate how much they would like donated to a charity in the region.

From Norbert Gräf’s haunting fine-art quality portraits of Namibia’s desolate landscapes to Madelaine Grambow’s meditations on decay and change in Germany, the Photocircle vision spans the globe. Whether it’s AIDS victims in South Africa, disadvantaged school children in Berlin, or health workers in Cambodia, each print translates an artist’s unique vision into an actionable rallying cry for change.

And with the click of a few shutters, Cartier-Bresson’s sage advice is realized: the photographer morphs from documenter to active participant.

Photocircle’s prints for change will be available in the MONOQI shop until 15th March, 2013 .The photographer, Photocircle, and MONOQI will each contribute 5% of the purchase price to a local charity.

It turns out that acting on unconscious sources of inspiration isn’t a bad idea. That’s exactly how a polystyrene cup ended up in London-born and based designer Paul Cocksedge’s oven, an act that would subsequently exert a dramatic influence over the course of his career. Hardly surprising then that experiment and an emphasis on letting impulsive ideas flow into his humorous, often magical designs have remained a signature Cocksedge calling card ever since.

Perhaps it’s this impartiality and acceptance of ideas, wherever they come from, that explains the secret of Cocksedge’s work, which strikes a perfect balance between spontaneity and careful attention to form and function. Solid training doesn’t hurt either. After graduating from the Sheffield Hallam University with a degree in industrial design, Cocksedge moved to London to take up a course in product design at the Royal College of Art under design legend Ron Arad.

Master & Apprentice

Cocksedge had already exhibited his work at the Issey Miyake Gallery in Tokyo in 2001 before he graduated, further exhibitions in London and Milan soon followed the completion of his studies and in 2003 he pulled off the great coup of his career with a helping hand from Arad. Something of a mentor, Arad introduced his apprentice and protégé to Ingo Maurer. The influential German lighting guru was so taken by the young designer’s talent that he offered him almost half the display space he had been allocated for the upcoming Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan in the hope of creating greater public awareness of Cocksedge’s work.

The plan worked and the fascinating spherical lamps Cocksedge had crafted from heat-shrunk polystyrene cups—the final form of the oven experiment—proved especially successful and garnered widespread praise. The result of a discovery made during the course of playful experiments, the magical transformation and rethinking of everyday objects has remained a leitmotif in the designer’s work ever since.

The Magic of Things

Cocksedge teamed up with business partner Joana Pinho to found the Paul Cocksedge design label in 2003, a venture soon amply rewarded with numerous awards, nominations, exhibitions and a series of commissions from illustrious brands such as Hèrmes, Mercedes Benz, Swarovski, Sony and BMW.

If there’s one underlying principle that connects the designer’s conceptual work and his supremely functional products, it’s an emphasis on the sculptural and a certain kind of magic that’s both personal and touching. ‘I’ve always been fascinated by magic’, says Cocksedge, whose work is also possessed of a remarkable human quality. Human interaction formed the central part of a conceptual installation in which the input of those interacting with the piece was key. As soon as two people kissed, an armada of light bulbs above them flickered to life and a bank donated one euro to charity.

Poetry of the Deed

That Cocksedge is capable of producing bright and bold creations is proven by his ‘Turn up of the Volume’ amplifier, an object less romantic than straight-forward and nostalgic that provides smartphones with a speaker and requires neither batteries nor electricity. Formed under careful application of heat, the object utilises an iconic object of yesteryear: a 12-inch vinyl record. His monolithic wooden and marble bookmarks meanwhile reverse expected relationships: instead of hiding wedged between the pages, the bookmark is endowed with such presence that it becomes a sculpture in its own right.

Paul Cocksedge’s objects are poems designed not so much to to be read as to be seen and used. Filled with a sense of magic that seems only to grow stronger as one moves through the designer’s oeuvre, it’s easy to be reminded of Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Unlike the mishap-prone apprentice in that poem, Paul Cocksedge more than knows what he’s doing. No wonder. He’s both an apprentice and a master.

Text: Christina Oswald
Translation: Benjamin Blackbenz
Images: Paul Cocksedge Studio

Some of Paul Cocksedge´s magical designs are available at the MONOQI store from the 7th of March to the 14th of March, 2013.

Change the Record by Paul Cocksedge from Dezeen on Vimeo.

Called into life by Walter Gropius in 1919 and closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi regime, the Bauhaus’ brief lifespan both coincided with the tumultuous years of the Weimar Republic and embodied the period’s greatest hopes and contradictions. Committed to the affirmation of the ‘living environment of machines and cars’ yet rooted in handcraft that proved impossible to mass-produce for a broad public, the movement’s greatest design achievements often failed to make it into our homes, languishing instead in dusty museum collections. German brand TECNOLUMEN’s unerringly faithful reproductions of classic Bauhaus lamps brings this fascinating chapter of design history to life, allowing us to get up close and personal to some of the most iconic products of the twentieth century.

Founded in 1980 in Bremen by Walter Schnepel, an accomplished designer in his own right, TECNOLUMEN’s original raison d’être was restricted to high quality, licensed reproductions of the WA 24, a geometrically harmonious lamp designed by Wilhelm Wagenfeld in 1924 so synonymous with the Bauhaus school that it’s more commonly known simply as the ‘Bauhaus Lamp’. The reproduction, executed according to original specifications gleaned from Weimar-era Bauhaus catalogues, met with critical acclaim and the undertaking soon expanded its range to include a wider series of original Bauhaus products and designs by the movement’s often-anonymous fellow travellers across Europe.

Curated with a keen eye for underlying construction and engineering principles rather than focusing on specific designers, the undertaking’s current collection spans the movement’s Weimar, Dessau and Berlin periods under the respective directorships of Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyers and Mies van der Rohe, highlighting trends and developments in a way that aligns closely with the school’s own emphasis on collaborative work and authorship. The approach is one that allows the object’s history to speak for itself while leaving the emphasis squarely where it always was for the movement: on intuitive, modern functionality.

As Walter Gropius noted in his 1925 Bauhaus ‘manifesto’, The Principles of Bauhaus Production, the school’s aim was to produce radically reduced models of objects that could later be mass-produced for the broader population. The gap between the exacting handcraft practised in the school’s workshops and a standardised production that could meet the needs of the people proved hard to close. In an era in which the average working class family’s weekly wage rarely exceeded 65 marks, the Bauhaus’ products remained prohibitively expensive, retailing at anywhere from 60 to 180 marks. As Otto Rittweger, an artist affiliated with the Bauhaus, observed in 1926, ‘it’s more difficult than ever for the vast majority of people who would like to possess Bauhaus products to actually afford one.’

Meticulously assembled by hand in the school’s metal workshops under the talented direction of László Moholy-Nagy and his protégé and successor Marianne Brandt, the school’s lamps, often among the most iconic products to come out of the Bauhaus, were especially difficult to mass-produce. As Wagenfeld later noted of the WA 24, manufacturers found it hard to translate Bauhaus ‘models’ into standardised products for a wider market while maintaining the original standards. Like other Bauhaus objects of the period, Wagenfeld’s Lamp ‘looked as though it could be inexpensively reproduced by machining techniques’ but was ‘in fact an extremely costly craft design’.

The paradox of this temporary impasse was that objects designed precisely for their use-value in homes ended up languishing in museums and private collections, becoming ever further removed from the purposes to which their designers had hoped they would be put.

The huge cultural value of TECNOLUMEN’s project lies precisely in its ability to offer a way out of this impasse, disseminating authentic Bauhaus products at affordable prices and putting these extraordinary, iconic objects back where they’ve always belonged: in our homes. Comprising both well-known classics such as Marianne Brandt and Hans Przyembel’s HMB 25/500 Suspension Lamp as well as lesser known anonymously designed lamps that evidence key Bauhaus construction principles like the Swedish SF 27 Table Lamp, the Bremen-based brand’s current collection opens the Bauhaus legacy up to closer scrutiny and wider participation. And that’s entirely consistent with the guiding values of an extraordinary twentieth century movement that truly believed in the extraordinary role design has in improving everyday life.

Three iconic Bauhaus-era lamps are currently on sale in the MONOQI shop until the 11th March 2013.

Text: Benjamin Blackbenz
Images: TECNOLUMEN

In ‘50s era America, scientists obsessed with the Space Age left an indelible mark on virtually every creation of the culture industry: the nation’s architects incorporated futuristic elements into their buildings. Product designers created televisions that featured curious satellite shapes. Car designers saw their vehicles roll off the lot outfitted with the wings of the future. In every corner of the great nation, science impacted design and created a new centre for the two spheres to interrogate one another.

Somewhere in the space where the two disciplines intersect, you’ll find the creative ethos of Dutch designer David Derksen. Hailed for crafting everything from genre-bending homewares that mimic natural processes to everyday essentials that marry scientific exactitude with the poetry of innovative design, Derksen is designer du jour on the creative circuit.

And he’s got a long list of plaudits to prove it. A graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven, The Netherlands premiere design school, Derksen has rocketed to the top of nearly every ‘one-to-watch’ list in the industry: Wallpaper*, Elle Decor, imm cologne and every credible design blog ever all swear by Derksen’s particular brand of artist-meets-lab-geek chic.

First unveiled at the ‘ Objects for Sale’ exhibit at Dutch Design Week, Derksen’s range of borosilicate glass and silver homewares were inspired by the Victorian scientist-cum-inventor, Sir James Dewar, the man responsible for inventing the modern-day Thermos. Taking its cues from Dewar’s innovative double-walled isolation containers, Derksen’s collection of lamps and vases are hand-shaped on a lathe with high heat and finished with silver salvaged from upcycled coffee flasks. Finished with colourful silicone bases, Derksen’s living accessories blend the formal language of science with the visual poetry of material contrasts.

It would seem that the longstanding conversation between science and design is only bound to grow richer. According to Paola Antonelli, curator of MoMa’s 2009 exhibit ‘Design and the Elastic Mind’, ‘‘science can teach design how to find its own core. Design is culture, and so is science. Both science and design — forward motors, providers of perspective, guardians of beauty and truth in all of their shades and manifestations — are essential to progress.’

Words: Lis Owuor
Images: David Derksen

David Derksen’s innovative glass and silver homewares will be available in the MONOQI shop until March 7th, 2013.

‘I’d like people to see our toys as poems’, says Playsam founder Carl Zedig of the idea underpinning the Swedish firm. ‘To achieve that, they have to be a combination of two things: a poem and an archetype.’ The result of an exclusive collaboration with Italian automobile manufacturer Fiat, Playsam’s model Fiat Mefistofele captures history and bestows it upon an object whose magic will unfold in the hands of children and collectors alike.

Founded in 1984, Playsam has become synonymous with sleek wooden models whose form embodies an approach applied with unerring consistency by the Swedish firm: a reduction of forms to the essential, ‘archetypical’ attributes and a focus on interactivity. It’s a creative ethos that not only reinforces the label’s unique position in the design world but also one that gives its objects a special power that appeals to our creative urges no matter how young or old we might be.

Playsam collections like Ulf Hanses’ Streamliner series, a luscious, near organic set of model cars made of lacquered wood, have been inducted into the pantheon of Scandinavian design classics and belong among the most influential design objects to come out of Sweden over the last 50 years. Playsam’s models are certainly toys, but they are also much, much more.

Inventive Spirits and the Need for Speed

The legendary status of the Fiat Mefistofele in the history of racing cars is almost as great as that of its literary namesake, the devil who convinced Goethe’s disgruntled scholar Faust to place a wager upon his soul. First built in 1908, the car’s fame came later when it beat the world land speed record in 1924, achieving a then unprecedented 234.97 kilometres per hour on the open road in Arpajon, France. Although the record was topped only 31 days later, the Fiat with its explosive, belching aeroplane engine made a lasting impression on the journalists who witnessed it in action and were quick to christen it with the name with which it’s become famous: Mefistofele.

Behind the wheel of this powerhouse sat British racing driver Sir Ernest Eldridge, a passionate follower of the latest developments in car building and a keen tinkerer. Eldridge had purchased the defunct car several years before he made his record attempt, fixing it up according to whim and availability with spare parts gleaned from old London buses and the engine of an aeroplane that had flown in the Great War. The result, as Playsam founder Carl Zedig notes, was nothing less than a behemoth motor set on wheels.

From Diabolic Racer to Organic Model

‘The challenge was to translate the brutal properties of the car into a clean design that harmonised with the rest of Playsam’s catalogue,’ notes Zedig. The task fell to designer Jonas Forsberg, who through careful deconstruction of the original was able to find a creative adaptation resting on the car’s fundamental attributes: the engine with its distinctive radiator grill, the long-nosed bonnet and the sharply pointed tail. Forsberg’s design brings these components together, lending the solid birch body an exuberant lightness with a smooth lacquer finish and movable wheels.

Although the resulting model is something more than a toy, it retains a toy’s playful charm. With the remarkable model Playsam has achieved both a way of making the technological past comprehensible to the present and a unique design to add to its already stellar series of collector’s items.

The Mefistofele by Playsam is available in the MONOQI shop until the 7th of March, 2013.

Text: Isabel Bredenbröker
Translation: Benjamin Blackbenz
Images: Playsam / Fiat / MONOQI