Frei association: bionics, parametrics, morphogenics and more with Jan Knippers, Achim Menges, Werner Sobek and Arnold Walz by Sophie Lovell. In 1964, the pioneering structural engineer and Head of the Institute for Concrete Structure, Fritz Leonhardt, lured Frei Otto to the University of Stuttgart to be the professor of a new research department. Otto followed an illustrious roll call of pioneering structural engineers there – but as an architect, his arrival marked an extraordinary flowering of new interdisciplinary research-driven innovation. Sophie Lovell spoke to four of Stuttgart University’s leading engineering and architecture professors about Frei Otto’s impact there, on how his symbiosis of architecture and engineering has continued to develop since, and where it’s headed next…

FREI DAYS AT STUTTGART

Stuttgart is famous for being in Germany’s engineering heartland: the cradle of the automobile industry and other precision engineered manufacturing, like Daimler, Porsche and Bosch. The University is renowned as a centre for automotive and aerospace engineering – areas where “lightweight” was already of primary concern. As an investigative architect, Otto brought his interdisciplinary thinking into an environment ripe for pushing boundaries.

During Frei Otto’s time at Stuttgart, heading up the Institute for Lightweight Structures between 1964 and 1991, there were a number of influential professors there, besides himself, who contributed to a climate of future-oriented research thinking in the early years and a strong cross-over between architecture and engineering. Werner Sobek, Jan Knippers and Arnold Walz all studied there during this period. As architect Arnold Walz recalls: “Two people at Stuttgart had a great influence on me: Frei Otto, and Horst Rittel – who was in charge of the Planning Institute, taught at Berkeley and had been the last Rector at the HfG Ulm. What Otto and Rittel had in common was their fundamental attitude. They weren’t interested in details but in basic understanding. For Otto, it was the relationship between form, materials and construction. While Rittel was a very radical thinker: he taught me to think and not to be afraid of doubt. With these basics, you can go a long way and are more likely to create something new.”

Jan Knippers, like Otto, first studied engineering at the Technical University in Berlin and found it frustratingly conventional. He moved to Stuttgart to work with Jörg Schlaich – one of Germany’s most important engineers – and immediately encountered a totally different spirit: “At Stuttgart, engineering was very much embedded in a cultural, societal and scientific context – much more advanced and more open, with the relationship to architecture much stronger”, he recalls. The proximity for these architects and engineers to the automotive and other local engineering industries meant they were in an environment where inventiveness and economy of materials were common practice.

Werner Sobek, who studied both engineering and architecture at Stuttgart, is head of ILEK: a merging of Frei Otto’s IL Institute and Jörg Schlaich’s Institute for Construction and Design, both professorships of which he inherited from his predecessors and mentors.

“We were very lucky”, he says, “that in Stuttgart in the early 1960s there were a few professors in the Departments of Architecture and Engineering who were looking for closer cooperation. From then on there was what we now call ‘the Second Stuttgart School’, which blossomed between 1960 and about 1980. The influences emanating from this school were very important: it bridged the gap between architecture and engineering and widened the focus out into aircraft design, car body design, textiles and more.”
FIRE AND WATER

It may have been a bonding moment between architecture and engineering, but this was not without its frictions. Not least between “architect” Otto and “engineer” Jörg Schlaich. “They appreciated each other, but nonetheless each had their distinctive field of research, which sometimes seemed like fire and water”, says Sobek. It seems the main trigger for the differences between these two research institute heads was when they both worked on the 1972 Olympic stadium project – Otto as a consultant to the architect Günter Behnisch, and Schleich as a chief engineer working for the company of another legendary Stuttgart professor, Fritz Leonhardt. According to Arnold Walz, Otto was more interested in exploring the boundaries of lightweight and elasticity with the roof: “But Schlaich couldn’t deal with this. I’m not sure if it was just his way of thinking or the building regulations you had to follow at the time. He wanted to make the structure as stiff as possible, like a concrete structure. Therefore all the parts grew in size and diameter. Maybe this is the reason the roof is still there. If Otto had been allowed to do the optimisations he wanted to, perhaps corrosion or other little things might have already destroyed the structure.”

OTTO FREI STUTTGART

Jan Knippers says he had never heard of Frei Otto whilst he was studying engineering in Berlin. “But in Stuttgart, I realised how important he was, because of his impact on the interface between architecture and engineering. He was someone who had a lot of charisma and a lot of ideas that were then taken up and worked on by others. I soon realised that many of the things that were later being worked on at the ITKE institute came originally from Otto’s ideas: membranes, lightweight building, rope nets, grid shells and so on.”

“He was not an architect, but a thinker”, says Sobek, “and the only lifelong professor in the entire university who did not have to teach: he was totally free of that… He’d often surprised everyone by arriving with some biologists from Berlin, for example, to compare mussel shells with concrete shells, or human bones with steel columns. This permanent jumping over fences, or even not accepting that there was a fence between disciplines, was very important at the time. He did not just jump the fence, he tore it down.”
Achim Menges, who did not move to Stuttgart until 2008, says the effects of Otto’s presence there are still felt: “I think the main impact of his work on our approach is that he really questioned established models of design. His radical revision of the design process through what he called ‘form-finding methods’ is really something we’re trying to extend into the computational realm.”

OTTO’S INFLUENCE

“Although he built little, Frei Otto had an incredible influence on architecture”, says Jan Knippers, “because he developed a whole new approach to the idea of design. Form and structure are not defined by architects but arise through physical structural principles. And this is what we’re continuing now – but on another level. Structures and forms are now performance-driven. As in biology, there is no longer the hierarchical differentiation between structure and material.”

Achim Menges marvels at how Otto managed to extend his methodology, “of trying to find a kind of equilibrium between external boundary conditions and internal force distribution”, towards a kind of construction technology, like the Multihalle in Mannheim, “where the form-finding actually took place on-site in a construction process that employed the elasticity of the material to find a particular form: a radical rethinking of what construction and fabrication could be.”

STUTTGART TODAY
Since succeeding Otto, Werner Sobek has developed ILEK further, particularly in terms of its multidisciplinarity: its 35-strong team now comprises architects, engineers, aircraft engineers, structural engineers, ceramic engineers and biologists. ILEK is still focused on making buildings lighter but on energy-related issues and areas such as urban planning too. “We’ve dramatically widened the scope” Sobek says.
BEYOND LIGHTWEIGHT
Another visionary thinker, also fixated on the lightweight, was Buckminster Fuller who regularly asked architects: “How much does your building weigh?” But now in a new century, this question no longer addresses the complexity of the issues involved. Concrete, for example, has evolved in quantum leaps: some ultra high strength concretes now have an extraordinary strength-to-weight capacity closer to that of high-quality steel or titanium. Werner Sobek now divides lightweight in construction into three main fields: material lightness, structural lightness and a third: “the energetic part”. It is this latter area that has dramatically superseded the levels of the second half of the twentieth century.

“Nobody talked about energy then”, says Sobek, “or if they did, it was energy consumption over the lifetime of the building, not embodied energy or grey energy, which means the energy you need for the production and transport of the materials involved. For example in a newly finished residential building, this embodied energy has already added up to between twenty-five and thirty-five times the future annual energy consumption of the building for heating, cooling and cooking etc.” In talking about “lightweight” today, architects and engineers, need to consider not just structure and materials but the whole holistic minimising of embodied energy emissions.

This thinking permeates all the research at ILEK and other institutes at Stuttgart. Research is going on into such things as adding “artificial muscles” with sensors to structures, enabling them to adapt to varying loads and other environmental conditions. Other investigations are into lightweight, multi-layered textile façades capable of “harvesting” and storing energy, and into new forms of superlight concrete structural elements “foamed” inside in places – just like bones.

NEW GOALS, NEW ROLES

So where is engineering and architecture going next at Stuttgart? What can we expect for the future?

Sobek points out that purely practically, with an expanding world population in a time of growing material shortages, the focus has to be on recyclability: “This is a topic I’ve been teaching since 1992 when there was nobody out there talking about recyclability. This puts us in the pole position with worldwide research, because we’ve been doing it for twenty years. That’s why Harvard, MIT, Chicago, Moscow and Singapore universities are knocking at our door asking for co-operations.”

Walz believes strongly there is no point just playing around experimenting if you don’t know where you’re heading: “The problem generally is that the steamboat of conventional architecture chugs stubbornly on, immune to change. Productivity in the building industry hasn’t changed for the last twenty-five years. We build now more or less as we did 100 years ago with just a sprinkling of the digital here and there. Frei Otto indicated new ways, but apart from a few things like rope nets, grid shells and tents, none have had an impact on everyday architecture. What’s missing is a goal. Society has to start defining common goals again. Where do we want to go?”

Menges agrees, seeing the pivotal role of production in the future, facilitating a high level of differentiation – formally less limited and achieving high levels of adaptation – as in nature. This means no beginning or end to a building, but a constant state of growth and adaptation.

“The distinction between the digital and the physical has been eroded with their gradual integration allowing new ways to address how things are made. This will have a profound impact on architecture. Design and process will ultimately converge, meaning buildings will never reach a final stage of conclusion.”

This essay was originally published in uncube magazine issue no. 33 in 2015, celebrating the life and works of Frei Otto.

“45 years after completion, this crazy superstructure works because it is modest by design and because it has been continuously cared for. It’s Big Housing meeting Big Car without a pile up because its architects did their research; because they believed their primary social responsibility towards quality of life; and because their clients continue to carry that through.”

I wrote about the Schlangenbader Straße Estate in Berlin for June 2025 “Roads” issue of The Architectural Review  The “Schlange” (snake), as locals call it, is a late 1970s superstructural landscape by Georg Heinrichs, Gerhard Krebs and Klaus Krebs, with a motorway running through it that is not as well-known as it probably should be. With new photography by the excellent Felix Koch.

Article link here.

Our 5th S72+ dinner was on our home turf of Berlin, together with the socially responsible architectural enterprise TOMAS, transformation of material and space. The theme “Burned Out  & Empty” was an invitation to discuss ideas on repurposing built space and sustainable construction in Berlin at a time of acute housing shortages and no environmental budget left to build new. The next stage of Berlin’s built future needs to be radically different. Our guests were Regula Lüscher, former Senate Building Director and State Secretary for urban Development and Housing in Berlin; Dag Ortkrass, Managing Partner at Diete+Siepmann Ingenieurgesellschaft; Thomas Beyerle, Professor of Real Estate Economics and Real Estate Research; Andreas Krüger, Managing Director of Belius GmbH; Lena Brühne, Managing Director of Art-Invest Real Estate Management; Olga Graf, food activist and Managing Director of Markthalle Neun in Berlin; and Hannes Bäuerle, Managing Director of Materialbank.

“The financial market wants maximum security and predictability, and building reactivation doesn’t offer that. But if sustainability and innovation were the yardstick for investment strategies, then that would change too.” – Regula Lüscher

“Space activation must be considered holistically and with a view to the future. This means: conversion instead of new construction, reusing materials, incorporating local ecosystems.” – Dag Ortkrass

“In times when society is becoming more and more divided, places and spaces for encounters and interaction are needed. Places where people, who might otherwise not come into contact, can interact. I also believe that such innovative initiatives should be owned by the city.” – Olga Graf

Our chef: Jonas Merold, our sponsors: Materialbank and Rosenthal, our photographer: Friedrich J Richter, our location: a temporary space in Mollstrasse 1, Berlin, which was originally built to house the GDR National News Service ADN.

The functionalist design philosophy of Dieter Rams and his colleagues in the 1960s was a direct response to the dark horrors of totalitarianism and fascism. It grew out of a strong belief in designing a more democratic, more egalitarian world within, full of light and labour-saving devices for ‘users’ (not ‘consumers’) – products that gave people the freedom of choice in the interiors of their homes to complement the rise of democracy without.

Read Sophie’s opinion piece on the (mis)use of Dieter Rams’ designs as signifiers in the TV series “Severance” here.

studio_lovell was invited to co-design an immersive dining experience and give a keynote talk at the Hotelschool The Hague for their Future of Food course in Amsterdam. We talked about learning to ask better questions and understanding ingredients as expressions of systems. And about all the different values expressed in the words used to talk about food and how changing some of those words can help change systems, by design. And we collaborated with tutors Joost de Vos and Robert Gallicano to develop a series of dishes in the multi-course dinner revolving around rocks and minerals – from cooking and baking with stones and edible clays to using pebbles as flavour vehicles and metaphors. We also talked about learning to ask better questions and understanding ingredients as expressions of systems. And about all the different values expressed in the words used to talk about food and how changing some of those words can help change systems, by design.

The S72+ dinners are collaborations between studio_lovell and like-minded partners with guests chosen from various disciplines. Our aim is to encourage knowledge exchange and expand the conversation around the table over shared food. We co-hosted this iteration with  Poggenpohl, curating three dinners in three locations: Hamburg, Düsseldorf and Stuttgart. Our topic of conversation was “New Standards of Luxury”. Our chef was Jonas Merold. And our guests were leading figures from the fields of furniture design, furniture fairs, porcelain manufacture, fashion, product design, experimental engineering, museum direction, wine-making, luxury brand marketing and more. 72 hours after each S72+ dinner (the time it takes to fully digest a meal), we ask our guests what they took home from the conversation.

“To me sensuality is a luxury. In a fast time, it can be a challenge to connect to your senses and engage in critical thinking. But I believe this is what our time needs from us.” – guest Melchior Grau, co-director of Grau

“Luxury is in the moments that take you beyond the everyday. Everyone is driven by something different and tries to shape the world in their own way. Only encounters beyond the everyday can make you realise how diverse life can be.” – guest Jan Knippers, Director of the ITKE

Luxury is giving a project time to mature – an almost impossible option in any industry. Luxury is also being able to buy something again and again.” – guest Insa Doan, Art Director at Rosenthal

See more guest quotes at studio_lovell’s Instagram and Instagram stories.

Photos © Jordana Schramm, Daniela Meise, Marko Seifert

Table service courtesy of Rosenthal

“The word “iconic” is representative of a toxic, destructive paradigm. It belongs to a mindset of dominance over people and nature, where humankind is perceived to be discrete from nature, not part of it, and where some people are more equal than others.”

Read the full article here.

“Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design”

Dieter Rams

During the early stages of working on this book, I travelled to Osaka, Japan, for an exhibition about the work of Dieter Rams in the context of twentieth-century design. On the evening after the opening, we were sitting in a bar at the top of a high-rise hotel, looking out through huge plate-glass windows at the nocturnal panorama of the dense industrial Osaka cityscape. It had been a long day of press conferences, opening speeches and seminars followed by a Japanese banquet in Dieter Rams’s honour, and now I was in the company of a small group of people including Klaus Klemp, the exhibition’s co-curator, Mark Adams and Daniel Nelson from Vitsœ, Dieter Rams and his wife Ingeborg, and Rams’s good friend and advisor Britte Siepenkothen, enjoying a nightcap of Japanese whisky.

We were quietly discussing the day’s events when Dieter Rams, who had worked hard all day and appeared tired, suddenly said, ‘Why on earth do we need another book about me?’ At the age of seventy-six, Rams had been famous as a designer since he was twenty-five and despite acknowledging that having people interested in your work and ideas is no bad thing, he hated all the limelight and media attention. ‘I want nothing to do with this star designer machine,’ he added, suddenly getting rather worked up. We all looked at him. Apart from the fact that, as one of the most respected industrial designers in the world, he was a ‘star’ whether he liked it or not, the reason why the world needed another book had been made absolutely clear earlier in the day in the huge auditorium packed with young designers and design students hanging on to Rams’s every word. A particularly beautiful and precise speech at the symposium by the Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa, who praised Rams’s oeuvre of what he aptly called ’correct design’, highlighted the level of respect there is for his work among today’s top professionals in the field. Klaus Klemp was the first to speak up: ‘Dieter,’ he said, ‘you still have work to do – to communicate and bring your message across to the young people.’ There was a chorus of assent from all those present.

Mollified, Rams agreed that this was a good reason to do another book. ‘But,’ he added, looking at me very intently, ‘it should be an empty book that says something important.’ In this respect, I have perhaps failed in my task. How do you write an empty book about someone whose working life has covered more than half a century and who has designed well over 500 products, and at the same time transmit all the complex interrelationships and contexts in which these products came into being? It would all be much simpler if one could state that Dieter Rams’s work and principles arose from him alone. But Rams would be the first to say that what constitutes his ‘work’ as an industrial designer is inseparable from the systems and networks through which it was produced. As such, assigning individual authorship to his work is, to some extent, meaningless. He could never have resolved his concepts without the ideas of his predecessors and his contemporaries, in what was an extraordinary era of worldwide growth and change. He could not have produced the things he did without the other designers at Braun, nor without the technicians, the managers, the materials manufacturers, the vision of the company’s original owners and even the marketing department. The same goes for his furniture design with Vitsœ, albeit on a smaller scale. Even beyond this vast network of people required to create his products, the designs themselves were modular and thus system-related. In nearly every instance, there are complex interrelationships within and between his designs: the improvements of individual components, how the products work with one another, how they are related aesthetically and in terms of intent, and how they function in the home. Last but not least, Rams’s products – in fact, his whole attitude and his principles – are geared towards the end user: they have to fit into the social systems, the lives and homes of a multitude of different kinds of people, and serve all of them discretely, reliably and comfortably. It would be wrong to remove the work of Dieter Rams from these contexts and yet trying to explain them has involved many words and many pictures. I trust he will forgive me for not writing an empty book, but there was much that needed to be said about his extraordinary life and work in order to transmit the essence of his message: ‘less but better’.

The world has changed since I wrote this book but the message within it has not. It seems a more fragile place than ever, yet in much more in need of context. It would be even harder to write an empty book that says something important in 2023 than it was in 2011. Dieter is now in his nineties. He moves a little slower but his passion for mending the world through design is undimmed. His wife Ingeborg sadly passed away in 2022, Britte, his manager, who kept the show on the road and secured the sound basis for Dieter’s historical legacy through the Rams Foundation is enjoying her well-earned retirement. Klaus is now running the Foundation. Mark, along with his family and team, continues to put Rams’s principles into practice as well as people and planet first with Vitsœ.

Although design has also moved on a great deal in terms of technology, materials and requirements since Dieter’s heyday, the internet has helped make him into something of an ‘icon’, a synonym for values and principles and the capacity for reflective intelligence in industrial design. Long after most of the products Dieter and his team designed have gone out of production (but not use, there is a thriving vintage market for certain objects) ­his name remains a benchmark for younger designers in a field flooded with change and responsibility.

Why is that? Of course, it’s true to says that, as a designer of consumer goods, Dieter Rams helped fill the world with more “things” at a time when commercial production exploded towards the resulting environmental tipping points we are faced with today. But it is also true to say that he did this with a passion for quality and usability that was often at odds with the interests of company profits. Dieter has been expounding for years to anyone who would listen about the need to make “less but better” in the face of catastrophic over-consumption. Now, at long last, the world might just be starting to listen.

“Trompe is mega-mannerist. Haut faux. It went so well with the rise of Neo-Liberalism in the 1980s. It makes perfect sense to revisit trompe in this era of snake oil salesmen, war criminals and fake news. It’s fake and it’s ostentatious but it’s also all about skilled sleight of hand, and strategic trickery. Take a step to the left and you will see it for the empty façade it really is.” Brief musings on trompe l’oeil for For Scale

Design thinking should be substituted for “food thinking” to enable humans to create properly holistic systems that no longer cause ecological chaos, writes Sophie Lovell.

“What if there was another, more relational way of approaching the design process? One that is based not on things or problems but on building and maintaining healthy relationships instead? A non-binary approach that is adaptive, and embraces context, equity and equality, allowing for even contradictory interests of myriad stakeholders. One that is less causal, more entangled….” Read the full article here.

“In the face of REALLY BIG UNSOLVABLE PROBLEMS, you can “lie down, curl up, try not to cry, cry a lot” in your shapeless DIY pillow fort. Or you can embrace your fear, hug it close, and whisper in its ear: “Shhhh, I own you now”. Putting your arms around the “radiance of a thousand suns” and making it your bitch is the vibe for a grown-up Bond villain lair. What’s not to love about a cuddlable nuclear floof that’s all BLOFELD’S KITTY ADORBS VIBES with just a hint of shag pile about it?”

Exposure Therapy: The Atomic Cloud as Décor

In a mood almost definitely triggered by THE 96TH ACADEMY AWARDS (2024), let us discuss the relevance of “atomic mushrooms” in décor.

Here we are again in one of those moments of massive apocalyptic angst, reminded of nuclear ARSE-nals thanks to OPPENHEIMER and the Atreides stockpile on D. VILLENEUVE’s Arrakis, not to mention the RIDICULOUS NUMBER of REAL, cartoonish Bond-type villains queueing up to conquer the world right now.

And yet, the “atomic mushroom” for the home we are talking about is not menacing. It is “HUGGABLE”:

The atomic mushroom in question is one of the Huggable Atomic Mushrooms by designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby feat. Michael Anastassiades. They made two: Priscila, which is in the MoMA, and then the other, less-known one – which is ten times more gorgeous because IT’S SO FLUFFY – called Seminole (after the eponymous 13.7 kiloton Enewetak Atoll nuclear explosion of 1956^[1]) and is a “therapy object” from their superbly titled series of DESIGNS FOR FRAGILE PERSONALITIES IN ANXIOUS TIMES from 2005. (How naive we all were; how prescient they were.)

It took almost two more decades for home therapy décor to really become a thing. During the Pandemic, lockdown loungers stuck at home all day busied about coddling themselves in comfort nests. Pillow forts became de rigueur. Giant bean bag dog beds for people made from washable plush appeared unironically in our feeds. As the anxious times increased, loungescape trends began to morph more and more towards kindergarten-coloured, round-cornered, chubby furniture. A veritable “childlike” design fest of regression instead of retro.

One could view a white mohair huggable atomic mushroom designed in 2005 as some kind of precursor to all this whimsy, but as a paragon of conceptual/speculative design, there is so much more to read into “Seminole” as a home décor object. This is not comfort décor, it is therapeutic decor. Subtle difference.

In the face of REALLY BIG UNSOLVABLE PROBLEMS, you can “lie down, curl up, try not to cry, cry a lot” in your shapeless DIY pillow fort. Or you can embrace your fear, hug it close, and whisper in its ear: “Shhhh, I own you now”. Putting your arms around the “radiance of a thousand suns” and making it your bitch is the vibe for a grown-up Bond villain lair. What’s not to love about a cuddlable nuclear floof that’s all BLOFELD’S KITTY ADORBS VIBES with just a hint of shag pile about it? Don’t be shy, embrace the evil.

“END TIMES CORRESPONDENT” IN THE FIELD

I, personally, got to cuddle one of Dunne and Raby’s Huggable Atomic Mushrooms once because I featured the one and only “Seminole” ever made in an exhibition called “FREAK SHOW” (2010) at the now-defunct Helmrinderknecht gallery in Berlin. RESULT: I can vouch for the queasy haptic deliciousness of the experience: somewhere – appropriately – around the level of snuggling with a “LET THE WORLD BURN” silver Persian.

Freak Show

“FREAK SHOW”, the exhibition, was named after a 1991 interactive CD-ROM by LOUISIANA ART-ROCK BAND “The Residents”. The whole thing was about speculative design without mentioning the word “speculative”, which is understandable because it was 2010 and ATOMIC PILLOW-makers Tony and Fiona hadn’t coined the term yet, as they later would. Instead, my “FREAK SHOW” catalogue notes waxed lyrical about “context” and “conceptual design” and how the designers in this exhibition^[2] were the designer “freaks” – freaks being crucial to design and interior décor because they don’t easily get embarrassed and can produce many absurd things without concern for the market, children of Gaetano Pesce that they were (“Fly my pretties”), AND YET, in a typical Capitalist twist, the market did, in fact, FIND (some of) THEM.

In a thoroughly anti-market mood, I intended to ask some “WHAT IF?”s about design FREAKdom with this exhibition, but Fiona and Tony put it much better in the preface to their book “SPECULATIVE EVERYTHING” (2013, ISBN: 978-0262019842) which included in its subtitle the exceptional phrase “SOCIAL DREAMING”:

“In a consumer society like ours, it is through buying goods that reality takes shape. The moment money is exchanged, a possible future becomes real. If it did not sell it would be sent back, becoming a rejected reality. In a consumer society, the moment we part with our money is the moment a little bit of reality is created. Not just physical reality or cultural but psychological, ethical, and behavioural. This is one of the purposes of critical design – to help us become more discerning consumers, to encourage people to demand more from industry and society as critical consumers.”

I would love to say the Huggable Atomic Mushroom series went into production. Every home should have one and that’s the truth. But Priscila remained a limited series and Seminole a one-off. They didn’t even reach heady design art market prices in the boom years despite having a shitload more shaggy depth and decor comfort value than, say, one of Ron Arad’s veritably VICIOUS and bloody uncomfortable Tempered Chairs.

Back in 2007, when I was writing a book on Design Art called Limited Edition, the year before the bottom began dropping out of all sorts of markets, the New York designer Marcus Tremonto told me that the Huggable Atomic Mushrooms were “at the more difficult end of the market” and selling for just 2,000 GBP a pop – a pittance in “Design Art” terms. But the Huggable Atomic Mushrooms are not Design Art, they are the best of what design could be. They invite fear into the domestic space and play with it.

Giving comfort in anxious times by helping to overcome residential fear should be every home improver’s goal: Décor for EMPOWERMENT, not regression. It’s time to gear up.

Riveting Sidenote

Design Art was perfect for all those nouveau cash-riche collectors of the noughties who’d made bucketloads in over-pumped markets. It represented accessible art investment, so you didn’t need to know much about it or buy into the whole old money thing to splash out. If it went with the living room décor in your Aspen retreat, you acquired it. All you had to do after that was remember not to sit on it.

I’m allowed to hate on Design Art because I wrote BOTH the books (EXPERT remember?) The other one is Furnish: Furniture and Interior Design for the 21^st Century (Gestalten, 2008) – and I’m talking about it here because it gives the context in which the “Designs For Fragile Personalities in Anxious Times” came about.

2005, when the Huggable Atomic Mushrooms were made, was right at that peak capitalism, peak Glasnost moment in which Design Art blossomed. It was exemplified by the auction price jumps for Marc Newson’s RIVETING late ‘80s, limited edition, Lockheed Lounge. (You know the one, it’s the shiny piece of furniture Madonna is balancing awkwardly on at the start of her 1993 “Rain” video.) Marc Newson made the Lounge in an edition of 10+2. In 2000, Christie’s sold one at auction for 105,000 USD. In 2006, Sotheby’s sold one for 1 million USD, which was then sold privately for an estimated 2.5 million shortly afterwards, and so on. Eternal growth: design for profit’s sake.

For T-1000-style chaise longue fans with compromised (or frozen) asset portfolios, Vitra’s functionally pointless, decorative Nippes (German word, look it up, Deepl is wrong, it doesn’t mean nipples), 1:6  SCALE miniature of the Lockheed Lounge is currently on offer online at the reduced price of 1097 Euros. It will, of course, NEVER give you the comfort of a Huggable Atomic Mushroom. It’s not at all fluffy, but it could, at a pinch, serve as pet décor for a very small pet.

You can’t really blame designers for trying to make a buck in the auction house back then, what with dwindling royalties and job security. Being a designer was starting to get really stressy too, because design was suddenly supposed to step up and solve all the world’s problems instead of just making nice things for the home like most people expected. It’s hard being misunderstood, so making hard-to-sit-on furniture was a logical retaliation.

For Scale is authored by David Michon

For Scale and Sophie Lovell go tone to tone on the topic of beige.

“Beige is the ULTIMATE symbol of end-stage capitalism… It is the most dangerous colour of all. In the 2020s, beige sofas started to wriggle like articulated maggots across interior shots: all rounded edges for people who don’t want to adult. Beige-in-beige lounges are a desert landscape. A sterile void. It’s beige as denial, a massive, pouty, self-indulgent sulk in the face of change. It’s an end-of-days attitude loaded with indifference.”

Read the full debate here.

The first monograph on the Danish architect and designer David Thulstrup, whose approach combines his Scandinavian heritage with a modern design language. David Thulstrup’s award-winning international and multi-disciplinary practice includes everything from residential architecture to interiors for restaurants, stores, and hotels, as well as designs for furniture and lighting.  More than 250 specially commissioned photographs, floor plans, architectural drawings, mood boards, process photographs, and four in-depth case studies, including his design for the interior and furniture for the new Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, illustrate more than 20 architectural and interiors projects, as well as 16 designs for furniture. This book traces Thulstrup’s life and influences from his childhood and education in Denmark, up to the present day, demonstrating his unique approach to design.

For the podcast series The Design Dialogues, Elizabeth Choppin, Editor-in-Chief of Design Anthology UK meets Sophie Lovell and her daughter Orlando, co-founders of The Common Table and editors of Taste and Place: A Design Hotels book to talk about food, regional identity, culinary heritage and travel.

“This is hephaestian furniture crafted to endure industrial-strength wear and tear with a half-life that could reach into millennia. It is both a direct contradiction of the planned obsolescence of our age and a metaphor for the Anthropocene – we can never, ever, throw away all the things we have made.”

Sophie Lovell was asked by designer /artist Philippe Malouin and The Breeder, Athens to contribute her essay “When You Cut into the Present, The Future Leaks Out” to Philippe’s “Steel Works” book alongside an interview by Felix Burrichter and Drew Zeiba and another critical text by Maria Cristina Didero.

From 1999, Sophie Lovell was Germany Correspondent, then Germany Editor at Wallpaper* magazine. During that time she brought and covered many features, profiles and news items to the magazine’s pages as well as online. From interviews with the likes of James Turrell, Virgil Abloh, Jonathan Ive, Dieter Rams, Stephen Burks and Konstantin Grcic to editing the Germany Supplement she accompanied the development of the magazine through its first four editors-in-chief until moving on to focus on her projects with studio_lovell in 2022.

S72+ is a new collaborative dinner series by studio_lovell, founders of The Common Table. It grew out of our desire to (quite literally) expand the conversations around food. We believe the best way to bring people together to exchange views and experiences is around a table. So, together with Vitsoe, our co-host for this first dinner in Berlin, we gathered twelve individuals of different ages and from a range of different industries and disciplines, including design, technology, architecture, manufacture, publishing, compliance, food and distribution, to join us at the table and talk about a pivotal issue of our time: supply chains. The location for this interdisciplinary dinner discussion was the living/work space of Arch+ magazine in Berlin. studio_lovell will continue their dinner series with varying partners in different disciplines and industries. Each time there will be new guest constellations, new locations and new topics for discussion. Just as we continue to seek out the people and projects forging ways towards a better, fairer food future with The Common Table, the S72+ dinners aim to help put some of those projects into action through new connections and inspiration.

Photo © Lena Giovanazzi

Hotels are unique storytelling hubs. They are defined by travel, but also by locality. Hotels are the first ports of call for the traveller to encounter first-hand new places, people, produce, cultures, tastes and techniques. And what better way to experience a visceral connection—a “taste of place”—than through food?

So Taste and Place: The Design Hotels Book is a food book with a difference. It takes the reader on a global journey with contributions from leading food writers, upcoming chefs and culinary innovators through examples of forward-looking ideas and inspirational practices. And all of this from a different perspective: a widening of the beam of focus to help show that if you pull on one string, you move all the others.

The book’s broad and inclusive embrace of food is richly illustrated with surprising examples found in and around selected Design Hotels™ locations. The stories in this volume go beyond the dish, the kitchen and the dining room. They explore the connectivity between food and locality, provenance, production, people, landscape and architecture from a holistic perspective. They are the binding agents for sharing new encounters with Design Hotels™’ readers, guests and hoteliers.

From regional terroir through the kitchen to the community, the stories gathered from special people behind the scenes, include tales and methods of self-production, social engagement, collaborative work practice, respect for cultures and ingredients, rethinking food waste and visionary big-picture hospitality.

From a big picture perspective, the mother and daughter team Sophie and Orlando Lovell of studio_lovell developed and edited this book for Design Hotels to encompass connective storytelling by respected writers, including LinYee Yuan, Gisela Williams, Ursula Heinzelmann and Nicholas Gill alongside newer talents such as Carla Bragagnini and Jake Potashnick. The journey through the chapters is designed to be a cyclical one of nourishment and renewal.

The themes are visually brought to life with specially commissioned photography from Marina Denisova, Vivek Vadoliya, Robbie Lawrence, Arnaud Montgard, Yuna Yagi, Stephanie Füssenich, Daniel Lober and Maureen Evans, with illustrations by Hanni Pannier. This book is a journey through food and culinary understanding from the terrain of Swiss and Japanese mountains and valleys, via the ancient island of Crete, Umbrian olive groves and the Oaxacan coast, dropping in on young kitchen teams in Ukraine and the Peloponnese along the way as well as exploring innovative practices in the Caribbean, Mexico and Indonesia.

How can we travel responsibly? How can we give back more than we take? As we look for ways to transition from a high-carbon to a low-carbon world, the ecosystem of a hotel seen through the lens of food provides a perfect microcosm to better understand bigger system changes. With this book, we at Design Hotels™ reflect on what we bring to these processes in terms of the hospitality we support and want to see in the future.

The Common Table is a publishing platform for food futures and systemic change founded and edited by Sophie Lovell and Orlando Lovell.

Through The Common Table, we share stories and ideas about food from around the world by people who are searching for ways to fix it. Our goal is to understand how systems of production, distribution and consumption can be changed – and to help identify the people and projects forging ways towards a better, fairer food future.

As a mother-daughter creative duo, living together in Berlin, we have many years of experience in all things design, architecture – and food. Our home has always been a place where we have cooked and hosted many meals and fed heated discussions with wonderful guests. Now we have extended our kitchen table and turned it into something bigger: a virtual workplace and a platform for change – through food.

We are starting this platform by inviting as “dinner guests” to our virtual table people we love, people who inspire us, people we would like to know more about and people we believe should be heard. Together we will ask, share, gather, investigate and exchange.

If you have inspiring stories or thoughts to share about changing the food system, feel free to reach out, we’d love to hear from you. All are welcome at The Common Table.

Email us at hello(at)thecommontable.eu

Hans-Gerd Grunwald is a true design aficionado who, parallel to and following a demanding career in the automobile industry, has devoted more time than most postgrads deep diving into his chosen field of investigation: German post-war design. His dedication and expertise led him to become a tour guide for one of the world’s leading applied arts museums, where he shares his delight in industrial design and stories about what happens behind the scenes in the creation of everyday appliances.

Grunwald was born in 1960 in Leverkusen, West Germany. His visual memories from his youth, like many of his generation, were marked by the powerful, democratic German design expressions of the time, as exemplified by the 1972 Munich Olympic Games and Braun household products. After leaving school, he went on to study technical drawing and technical product design. Much of his working life since has been spent at BMW, where he worked as a quality engineer accompanying all areas of the design and development process of automobiles up to production. BMW Group’s parent plant is located in Munich and so for the last 25 years, this city in Bavaria has also been Grunwald’s primary home.

Three years ago, Grunwald had the chance to take early retirement from the automobile industry and focus completely on his first great love: design. He had always had a keen interest in the history of design and product development and became something of an expert in the field in his own time through correspondence courses and his own research. After BMW he was able to turn what was essentially his hobby of giving guided design tours of the area and museums to friends and acquaintances, into becoming a specialist tour guide at Die Neue Sammlung – The Design Museum in Munich, which is one of the largest and most important museums of applied art in the world.

Grunwald’s particular area of interest is in the HFG Ulm (Ulm Design School), which operated from 1953-68. It was founded by Inge Aicher-Scholl, Otl Aicher and Max Bill (a former Bauhaus student). During its short existence, the school was ground-breaking in its rational and systems-thinking approach to industrial design and visual communication. It is also where most of the designers came from that pioneered the revolution in design that took place at Braun in the mid-1950s, and strongly influenced a young Dieter Rams in his design approach. One of the first products that really made Rams’ name at Braun was the SK 4 Radio-Phonograph from 1956 that he collaborated on together with Hans Gugelot, who was a tutor at HFG Ulm and a key designer of many Braun products at the time.

Hans-Gerd Grunwald moved into his current, modest, two-roomed apartment in the Schwabing district of Munich in 2016. It was almost a matter of course that his keen interest in the rational, functional, modular design of the “Second Modernism” as practiced at the Ulm School led him to choose Dieter Rams’ Universal Shelving System to house his extensive industrial design collection. “I developed an interest in having good furniture and started to collect things with a design approach around 25 years ago”, he explains, “that was when I bought my first Wassily chair by Marcel Breuer. Then came scale models of cars, and an AEG electric kettle by Peter Behrens from 1909 that I found at a local flea market (see image L7). I also have a collection of 1:6 scale miniature furniture pieces from Vitra. I don’t have the space in my two-roomed flat for all the furniture that I like, so sometimes I buy a model instead.”

Through his work doing the guided tours for the museum, Grunwald also moved towards buying vintage Braun products, such as hairdryers, cameras and shavers. “I have all their shaver models from 1950 up to the ‘Sixtant’ of 1962”, he says, “because it is interesting to see, through them, the development of a product. Sometimes when I do a tour I take a shaver with me and open it to show how it is made and the intelligence of the design.”

A new favourite piece of Grunwald’s is a 1953 compact Rangefinder Werra camera made in VEB Carl Zeiss Jena in the GDR. (see image L5 on right hand side) “What I like about it is that the design is really, really simple. It looks like a Braun object – like it could have been designed by Dieter Rams or Otl Aicher or Hans Gugelot –but it was designed two or three years before the start of the design studies at HFG Ulm by Rudolf Müller. For me, its extraordinarily clean, puristic form, the golden section of the front and the shutter release as just a single control element on the top – kind of like a ‘home button’ – make it a thing to fall in love with. The rest of the controls are protected from the rain and visually tidy on the underside and the protective cap can also be used as a lens hood.”

The story behind Grunwald’s fascination with this camera started with a new app introduced by the Neue Sammlung last year called “The Sound of Design” [“Der Sound des Wirtschaftswunders”], which allows visitors to listen to the sounds of appliances from the 1950s and ’60s on display in the museum. In this collection, there are about ten different objects from the GDR and the Werra camera is one of them. “It came as quite a shock to me”, says Grunwald, “I was born 60 years ago in West Germany and for the first 30 years of my life I lived in a divided Germany. After a further 30 years of living in a united Germany, I realized I could tell you a lot about Scandinavian or Italian design but knew next to nothing about GDR design and production. So I did some research in the museum library and found out more, also about this camera, and thought ‘I must have it, it’s a really important object’.”

It’s not just objects that are close to Grunwald’s heart, but their context too: the stories and circumstances that surround them. Through context, objects acquire meaning and the user greater understanding. When the Neue Sammlung asked him to do his tours, they liked the idea of having someone from industry to explain industrial design from a completely different point of view from that of an art historian, he says. “When you talk about objects there is the big story relating to the historical style on the one hand, but there are also a lot of small stories from the people who designed and made it on the other. With art, for example, you have one artist that painted a particular picture. With design it doesn’t work like that. An industrial design object is never invented by one person alone. Take the Braun Sixtant shaver I mentioned earlier, which is famous for its black and silver colour combination. It has this colour because Ewin Braun and Fritz Eichler [Rams’ predecessor as head of design at Braun] really liked some Scandinavian cutlery design from the 1950s that was silver with black plastic handles. So Eichler suggested to Hans Gugelot, the ‘designer’ of the SM 3 Sixtant, together with Gerd Alfred Müller, to try that combination with a shaver. After Müller left Braun he went to work for the pen-makers Lamy where he used the same colour combination for his designs there. A product never stands alone. This is what I try to share with my tours.”

The arrangement of Grunwald’s collection throughout his home is very specific and clearly a lot of thought has gone into where each object is placed. “When you start your professional life with technical drawing, you have to be precise, so yes part of me does like precision”, he says, adding: “It’s a gift but also a burden sometimes. It’s about how I see things and aesthetic compositions. I was always fascinated by Wassily Kandinsky’s work – not so much his paintings as his theoretical works on form such as Point and Line to Plane – because it showed me that there was a concept behind why things work one way and not another. So over the years I have developed an eye for arrangements. Graphic design for a book, for example, is all about how you arrange things. It’s the same exhibits in a museum or for the contents of your shelves at home.”

Although some of the objects in his collection look factory-fresh, despite their age, others bear the marks of years of use. Dieter Rams is very keen on the traditional Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, which is all about transience and imperfection – it is the idea that an object becomes beautiful through time and use. It might seem a contradiction to apply this term to an industrial object, as against one that is crafted by hand, but what they have in common is that they are both tools for the user. Grunwald explains: “My SK 4 radio-phonograph, for example, is old but it looks new, like fresh from the factory, because it has been repainted over the years. I chose this one because it is a big piece and I wanted to have the same feeling that people must have had in the 1950s about having what was really the first technical object, as against a piece of furniture, in their living spaces. On the other hand, I have a 1955 Braun SK 1 radio, designed by Fritz Eichler and Artur Braun, where you can really see the traces of use over the years and the plastic has discoloured in places. I like this too, precisely because it has been used. It’s 65 years old and has done what it was made for. For me it is a balance, I can live with both of them.”

The precision curation of the contents of Gerhard’s shelves extends to his kitchen as well. Even the food packaging appears to be a considered part of the aesthetic. “I did actually buy a whole bunch of Bärenmarke condensed milk cans, which have a distinctive light blue graphic design on the tin, because they contrasted so nicely with the orange wall behind”, he admits. His kitchen shelves are also home to a collection of coffeemakers, including the Moka Express first designed by Alfonso Bialetti in the 1930s, as well as Richard Sapper’s 9090 Espresso maker for Alessi alongside some Braun kitchen appliances, like the coffee grinder by Reinhold Weiss. “All of them look really new”, he says, “but I use them, they are not just for display.”

There are two designers in particular whose work runs like threads through Gerhard’s collection and his research. The first of them is the aforementioned Hans Gugelot (1920-1965), one of the least-known greats of his profession and professor at HFG Ulm, who was stopped short in his prime by a heart attack at the age of 45. “If he had lived longer I think we would have known much more about him and he would have achieved so much more” says Gerhard. He was incredibly important for the Ulm Design School. The product design there was much more impressive than that of the Bauhaus in my opinion –­ much purer, much more methodical – and he was responsible for that. He also influenced many students of product design, including Reinhold Weiss and Richard Fischer who went on to Braun. Gugelot was certainly known for his contribution to Braun design, but I think it is a pity that he is not more known more for it. The SK 4 again is a good example for context in this respect. The design is not just Rams, it is not just Gugelot, and it is not just Rams and Gugelot either. It also an idea by Fritz Eichler, it’s a system from Wilhelm Wagenfeld and Gerd-Alfred Müller, it’s a layout from Otl Aicher…there are seven or eight different people who made their contribution to it. That is how industrial design is. Nobody mentions my name when talking about a BMW, or the name of the engineer who designed part of the engine.”

The other important person in Gerhard’s life is the graphic designer and typographer Otl Aicher (1922-1991), so much so that the entire colour scheme of his apartment derives from his work. “As a child I remember Otl Aicher’s designs for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich being pretty much omnipresent, but it wasn’t until much later that I learned the story behind them”, explains Gerhard. Aicher was a school friend of Werner Scholl, the brother of the German anti-Nazi activists Hans and Sophie Scholl, who were executed by the Nazi regime in 1943. Aicher too was strongly opposed to the Nazis and deserted the army and went into hiding at the Scholl’s family home towards the end of WWII. He later married their older sister Inge Scholl and they both, together with Max Bill, founded the Ulm Design School. “When Aicher became the lead designer for the 1972 Olympics he wanted to create something as far as possible from the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936 under the Nazis, so the colour scheme does not include red, for example, which he felt was the colour of dictators.

“What really fascinated me about his work for the games was this combination of his knowledge and skill in graphic design and the content, or intention behind it – that his decisions were not just aesthetic ones. The 1972 Olympic Games were about showing another kind of Germany to the world. I spent a lot of time researching Otl Aicher, looking through the HFG Ulm archives and talking to people who had worked with him. So when I moved into my apartment, which incidentally is only a few hundred metres away from where Aicher’s design studio was and from where Hans and Sophie Scholl used to live, I decided to make the connection I also have in my heart to his work to the walls of my home by painting each room one of the colours from the Olympic Games: orange for the kitchen, blue for the living room, green for the bedroom/office and silver in the hallway. Silver was the celebratory colour used instead of gold. I also have pictures of some of his early designs on the walls, including one of the Olympic torch relay that I like very much because on one hand all the colours meet in it and in the other hand because he took this thing that the Nazis introduced (the torch relay) and completely changed its representation, stripping it of all the mystification and symbolism the Nazis tried to imply with it.”

So Grunwald’s choice of domestic colour scheme was not just an aesthetic, but a political and ethical one as well.  It’s an unusual way to choose the paint for your apartment. But it brings in a lot of layers of context, which is totally in keeping with this design expert’s ethos:  the colour scheme, together with the furniture and the objects on display, complete the interior decoration of his flat as a collaboration across time with most of the greats of German post-war design in a precisely perfect way.