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.

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. Please get in touch if you are interested in collaborating.

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.

How do you make a travel magazine during a lockdown? By choosing a theme that is both universal and empathic: “walking”. By working with local correspondents and photographers. By aiming for a better diversity of viewpoints from all over the world. By reassessing what “travel” and “luxury” mean. By thinking contextually and holistically.

With her editorship of the 2021/22 issue of Directions magazine, Sophie Lovell brought a new, more contextual approach. She brought contributions from poets and artists in from all over the world; introduced a piggy-back system for writers and photographers to work together on a story despite being thousands of miles apart; used only local contributors; wrote a ten-point “Good Traveller” manifesto; suggested a walking app collaboration for walking routes local to Design Hotels’ 300-odd partner hotels and encouraged the team to make the entire issue without a single flight being taken for it. The result was so good, they gave it two covers.

Editorial

This issue of Directions was made under extraordinary conditions in an extraordinary moment for travel, but with a great deal of care—and with hope. Our aim has been to make it a travellers’ companion, a healing, positive, timeless space. At the same time, it is the space where we push boundaries, feel our way into the future, and represent the evolution in our thinking.

With the whole world feeling out of step, it seemed natural to take walking as the anchor for this issue. Walking is an act and culture older than humanity itself, one that binds us to the land, and lets our imaginations take flight. The steady beat of putting one foot in front of the other also grounds us, connects us, and carries us forward into change. In our opening essay, the author and veteran walker Jini Reddy looks at great journeys made by foot—known and less known—and bring them in step with the times in an uplifting paean to walking.

Walking also sets loose so many new ideas. In My Own Private Odyssey, we asked 11 creatives to take and document journeys of their own from where they happened to be in the moment, and share with us their inspirations gathered along the way. The incredible gallery that resulted really blew us away, as did the wealth of multimedia material our invited artists and poets shared with us—some of which you will be able to experience on our digital platform as well.

A trip to discover the fruits of foraging and 4,000 years of farming know-how in the Andean high-altitude biospheres can bring us closer to the land and cultural practices that sustain us. But how do you do a story about the people and plants of Peru’s Sacred Valley during lockdown? Thanks to the wonders of technology, our author Carla Bragagnini was able to virtually piggyback along with photographer Antonio Sorrentino as he hiked up and down mountains and waded through fields. At one point the crew for this story was coordinating live on location from four different continents without a single flight being taken for the purpose.

This new buddy system proved so effective that we intend to use it as a model in the future as we endeavour to bring more local reporting by contributors with a genuine connection to place and culture (and also reduce our environmental footprint by doing so). This fits with our promadic view that travel should be proactive and purposeful. In that vein, with The Good Traveler, we share our new checklist of good principles for travelling: no dogma, no rules, just a work in progress, one step at a time.

There is no point in having good ideas if you don’t share them. The core of this issue of Directions has been about rediscovering the genuine joy and solace to be found in the simple act of walking. So while producing this magazine we reached out to all our 300+ member hotels and asked them to share their most picturesque, challenging, and inspiring walking routes and turned them into the brand new Design Hotels Walks, highlights of which you will find here in the Locator, and yet more online.

Finally, we cannot be sure what the coming year will bring in this great odyssey we all share, but we can be sure that when we move around our beautiful planet, the need to be more conscious of each other, of our communities and our environment is universal. So let us choose our paths together with care, with love—and with a spring in our step.

“Now is not a time for metaphorical sticking plasters or vanity projects, it is a time for change and a time for action.”

Archifutures Volume 6: Agency, A field guide to reclaiming the future of architecture is a call to action for architects, urbanists and designers.

With essays, interviews, projects and original works by young practitioners and more established figures alike, this sixth volume in the Archifutures series for the Future Architecture platform is the most activist to date.

The mandate of architects and urbanists today goes way beyond designing buildings, it includes changing behaviour, influencing and impacting policy, and building bottom-up agency with new understandings of value, justice and cultural production. This task is best achieved by sharing not just strategies but also practice – completely openly and freely. This sixth volume of Archifutures, therefore, focuses on emerging narratives and strategies that can help architects adapt their practice towards more effective agency in order to meet the greater, more universal tasks that are upon all of humankind.

It is sometimes hard to have hope in the face of the enormous problems the world is currently facing, but the projects and practices featured in this and the five previous volumes of Archifutures indicate that we already have the ideas and skills to make the necessary changes – but the means for achieving them are unevenly distributed. These projects show ways forward in addressing ecological destruction, racial injustice, housing inequality and landscapes of conflict. They point to new modes of design practice, rethinking what it means to be “an architect” in a world of spatial injustice.

Contributors: 45°, Architects Climate Action Network, Thomas Aquilina, Architekturos Fondas, ateliermob, BC Architects and Studies[BE], Coloco, Critical Practice, Dark Matter Labs, Arturo Franco & Ana Román, Institute for Linear Research, Will Jennings, Constantinos Marcou, Mies. TV, Office of Human Resources, Recetas Urbanas, Jason Rhys Parry, Point Supreme, Proyecto Colectivo, Recetas Urbanas, Marie-Louise Richards, Unfolding Pavilion, Un-war Space Lab, Marina Otero Verzier.

“During the spring of 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic, Berlin Tegel ‘Otto Lilienthal’ Airport looked like a stranded spacecraft. Once a symbol of the fluid mobility of the West and an hommage to both the automobile and the aeroplane, the crowded airport was suddenly completely empty, offering unobstructed views of its singular architecture and myriad of improvised structures…”

TXL The Drive-in Airport

When writing about buildings in Berlin, one is always very conscious of their place in the historical fabric, whether they were damaged or destroyed during the WWII and then rebuilt or repurposed; whether they fill a gap crated by bombs or policy; whether they have a compromised historical past; or whether they had some particular additional representative function when the city was divided between 1946 and 1989. The story of Berlin Tegel “Otto Lilienthal” Airport, to give it its full name, or TXL, to call it by its IATA code, is a classic Berlin city planning and architectural tale in this respect.

After WWII and up until 1989, West Berlin was an island in Cold War Europe that was predominantly connected to the West through the umbilical cord of an “air corridor”, through which people and provisions got in and out to other Western states by air. There was a road route, but it meant travelling through GDR-controlled territory and submitting yourself to checkpoints. Since many residents of West Berlin were refugees from “the East”, this meant their only safe route in and out was by plane. This air route had mythological status from early on thanks to the Stalinist Soviet blockade, which forced the three Western Allies (France, USA and Great Britain) to supply the entire city of two million residents by air alone between June 24, 1948, and May 12, 1949, in an endeavour that became known as the Berlin Airlift.

By the time the 1960s arrived, along with the Berlin Wall, the Jet Age was in full swing and civil traffic was of increasing importance despite no end to the Cold War in sight. It became clear that the air route into Berlin was in need of modernising. West Berlin needed a new international airport: a modern gateway to the rest of the West. But, West Berlin was tiny and suitable location options were in very short supply.  There was only one big, high-capacity airport in West Berlin: Tempelhof Airport, which was close to the city centre. But Tempelhof’s runway was now too short for increasingly modern aircraft and long-haul or fully-laden flights could not land and take off there. It was also built by the Nazis and looked like it, so it was not really the ideal new face of international travel for Berlin.  There was another smaller airbase in the British sector in the South West of the city but its runway was also too short. In the Tegel district, in the French sector, in the northwest of Berlin, however, was a long enough runway to take big international jets. The runway itself was an extraordinary feat of building in its own right: it was constructed mostly by hand in 1948 during the Soviet blockade in just 90 days by tens of thousands of Berliners, half of whom were women.

A suitable runway had been found, now all that was needed was an international airport to go with it. So in the mid-1960s, an international competition was held to design it. Architecture practices from all over the world entered their designs, but the winners of the competition were a pair of young German architects barely out of grad school who had not built anything of any significance to date and barely had a proper office: Meinhard von Gerkan and Volkwin Marg. It was quite a sensation at the time. Today they are better known as Gerkan, Marg and Partners (gmp), and their firm has 13 offices worldwide and over 300 employees. They have designed a myriad of important buildings since, both worldwide and in Berlin, including two other great transport gateways to the city:  the massive multi-level Hauptbahnhof (central station) and the infamous new Berlin Brandenburg Airport “Willy Brandt”, International Airport, known to all as BER (Bay-Ay-Air) built to replace TXL and opening nine years behind schedule – but that is another story.  But back in the mid-sixties, when they won the Tegel competition, they were terra incognita.

“It was our first big project”, explains Volkwin Marg, now 84. He and Gerkan had studied together in Braunschweig and earned money to support themselves by doing competition drawings for other architects. After graduating, they rented a room together in Hamburg and continued doing competition drawings with other architects, but this time under their own names and as project partners. It turned out to be a winning combination, “Basically, we shot from the hip and hit the target”, explains Marg, “We won seven of them in total that first year, which was sensational, and the largest of these was the international architecture competition for Tegel Airport.”

As luck would have it, Gerkan had just finished his university thesis on a new design for Langenhagen airport in Hanover and had therefore intensively studied the theme of airports for his final year project. So they already had a great deal of research on this highly specialised architecture topic under their belts. Nevertheless, they could not believe their luck: “It was, of course, a huge surprise and a great joy”, remembers Marg, “a unique chance for us and for Berlin at the time – epochal”.

Since they had somehow managed to award this commission to a pair of unknowns with no other airport references whatsoever, instead of to a large, experienced, high-capacity practice, representatives from the airport company decided to visit von Gerkan and Marg (and another university friend Klaus Nickels, who was in on the project too) in their office in Hamburg and gain an impression of who they were working with. “We were a tiny office!” recounts Marg. “So we very quickly upgraded the rented apartment we were working in with lots of tabletops, that we made white covers for. Then we brought in lots of T-squares and lots of friends that we dressed in white coats, who then stood there moving rulers around and drawing, all to give the impression of a functioning architecture office.”

Gerkan and Marg brought in another partner architect for the project, called Rolf Niedballa, who had experience in managing contracts and bids. “He had the advantage of being a bit older than us and already experienced as a construction supervisor”, says Marg. They also had the good fortune of having a highly experienced client: “The airport company were of course just the users, and they were smart enough to hand over the actual building of the airport to the Berlin Hochbauamt [Department for Building and Housing]: a public authority that really understood how to build and was qualified to be the client”, he adds, “This is a great difference to just letting planning happen – as was the case with the BER airport that we planned [much] later. There it was the airport operator, who was not at all qualified [to be the client].”

Nevertheless, the Tegel project, completed in 1974, was huge and the client wisely commissioned the airport terminal and all the ancillary buildings from Gerkan, Marg and Partners in stages, “one on top of the other: first the terminal, then the front end of the terminal, then the separate power station, the hangars,  then the whole frontage development: baggage, customs, fire brigade etc., – everything that belongs to an airport.”

For passengers that have travelled via the original terminal building at TXL (not the later, tacked on tin-clad hangars added when capacity was bursting at the seams because completion of its new replacement, BER, was interminably delayed), it is a surprisingly unstressful experience. Many of my frequent flier colleagues profess a great affection for Tegel because it is “so easy” but few stop to think about why. It certainly does not have much to do with looks. TXL is as brutalist as they come, horizontal, low-slung and fixed firmly on the ground. There are no light and airy allusions to flight in the design whatsoever. But behind that impression of easiness is deliberate intent: Tegel Airport is completely dedicated to the passenger.

Designed as it was in the mid-sixties, TXL is also an airport that is geared towards the age of the automobile – as the ultimate representation of freedom. A popular slogan in Germany back then was: “Freie fahrt für freie Bürger!” (free driving for free citizens). The genius of this airport design is that it creates essentially the thinnest feasible interface between car and plane. If you look at an aerial view, you can see clearly that its form is designed to bring two sides together with the shortest possible distance in between. There is an “air” side for the movement of the airplanes, including take-off, landing, taxiways, apron and parking positions Marg describes as “just like ships at a quay –  but nose-in”.

On the other side of the interface, which is the gates, is a building for cars. When it was built, you could drive right up to your check-in. “In other airports you had to park your car, enter the terminal and then cover long distances per pedes to your aeroplane”, says Marg. For him and his partners, the greatest imaginable luxury would be to drive directly to where your plane is parked and there check in your luggage, show your passport, get your boarding pass, walk through the gate and get straight onto the plane. So that is what they designed: “A totally decentralised checking-in system with the shortest distances that had ever been built.” The distance between the drop off point with the car and the counters is indeed no longer than 30 metres. TXL is a drive-in airport.

With this aim of a decentralised, slim interface in mind, the logical solution was to create a ring-shaped design. To make it efficient, the ring was turned into a polygon, which led to the architects choosing an overriding hexagonal geometry to facilitate routing and configuration of the approach roads, “since it is easier to drive through forks than T-junctions”, says Marg. The original plan had a large hexagonal car park in the middle that was only partially realised.

“There was also another reason for that form”, adds Marg, “the design was made before we had computers and the architect’s main tools were the parallel ruler and the set square. If you use the triangle which has a 60 degree and a 30-degree angle, you can design hexagonally very quickly. If you were trying to design a free form back then like [Hans Scharoun’s 1963] Berlin Philharmonie, then nothing repeats itself and it is infinitely more complicated in every respect.” The young architects must have been very aware of the older architect’s struggles to build and complete his iconic and highly experimental concert-hall-in-the-round at the time they were creating their airport design.

When the airport was completed in 1974 there was no end to the Cold War in sight and hence no expectation of any change in territory size for tiny West Berlin. Nevertheless, the architects had designed TXL with expansion in mind. The idea was to double capacity by building a second hexagonal ring joined to the first by the main building with its tower, like a pair of spectacles. But the second ring was never built and Tegel remained a monocle that later gained provisional extensions that had nothing to do with the original decentralised principle.

The decentralised design of the TXL terminal was all about how to save the passengers time; how to save them from walking long distances and long waiting times. Instead of the passengers doing the walking, the airport staff had to walk to them and their gates to attend to each plane-load as they embarked or disembarked. The terminal’s primary function was to get people from their cars to their planes and planes to cars as comfortably and efficiently as possible. Mass transport on the land side was never really a big consideration. You can travel by bus to Tegel Airport, but there are no train or underground lines to it. The thinking was probably that if you could afford a plane ticket, you could afford to pay someone to drive you to the airport or to pick you up. And anyway, who didn’t have a car?

Since TXL was built, almost half a century ago, much has changed in the global economy, air travel and airport design as well. The subsequent rise in neoliberal capitalism has meant that travel hubs are no longer just for getting from A to B, but have primarily become retail opportunities. Since 9/11 too, anti-terrorist security controls have also massively changed airport structures. In today’s generic international airport, passengers are funnelled into central security areas where they and their luggage are screened for potential hazards. Instead of the customer being king, they are essentially treated as walking danger zones that could be carrying, bombs, weapons or disease.  Once the screened and tagged passengers are all through the queues and discomfort of central security control, they are then squeezed again through a large retail area in an attempt to relieve them of as much of their money as possible by encouraging them to buy things largely unrelated to their journey. There they wait, in the shopping mall, until being told where to board their planes, whose gates are often a (very) long walk away.

This is exactly what did not happen at Tegel Airport and this is why passengers, however subconsciously, loved it. It was an airport experience where you were not treated like cattle. “It was never done as perfectly again as it was in Tegel”, says Marg. “The times have sadly changed. We now stand under the dictatorship of consumption, and airports stand under the tyranny of having to earn their money through retail because the airport fees are not sufficient. And on top of that terrorism has forced total control.” Air travel will never be the same again. And perhaps that is also why many mourn the passing of TXL as an airport. COVID-19 and global pandemic control is a new factor that is not going to go away in the foreseeable future. And with the climate emergency, it now looks the Jet Age is well and truly over. Flying in the future will be something completely different and architects will need to design completely different buildings for it. Hopefully though, whichever form they take, those buildings will be primarily in the service of the passenger, as TXL was: a beautifully designed, drive-in airport for a bygone age.

Sophie Lovell, November 2020

To celebrate the centenary of their razor blade factory in Thüringen, Germany, the shaving company Harry’s asked Sophie Lovell to make a custom, in-house book. The result is a story about survival, determination, about adaptability, about people and one of the publications we are most proud of to date.

“Incredibly, in the century that has passed since its founding, this factory has weathered the Great Depression the Nazi regime, two world wars, Soviet occupation, two more regime changes and four changes in ownership. It is still there, still making razor blades, and is very much flourishing. The company that was once called Ritzma-Werk, then VEB Feintechnik, then Feintechnik GmbH, which was bought in 2014 by the American startup Harry’s Inc., has continued to keep production going through many turbulent changes. The primary reason for this survival is an unbroken thread of workers, managers, engineers and owners who have grafted, fixed, patched, taken risks, updated and invented their way through good times and bad.”

This book is for them.

studio_lovell are four-dimensional thinkers offering consultation in transformative strategic context building through the medium of digital and print publication.

studio_lovell use their interdisciplinary experience in the fields of design, architecture and food to help reposition brands towards a regenerative, ethical, big-picture future.

studio_lovell combine their holistic approach with their worldwide network of collaborators, enabling them to develop sustainable solutions across a range of media.

Sophie Lovell was born in London and first studied Biology at Sussex University before going on to study Public Art and Design at Chelsea College of Art & Design. She moved to Berlin in 1994 and has been the Germany Editor of ‘Wallpaper’ magazine since 2000. Sophie was formerly editor-in-chief of uncube magazine; executive editor of ‘form’ magazine; architecture and design editor of ‘Qvest’ magazine, and editor-in-chief of ‘Directions’ magazine. She has written and edited a number of books on design and architecture and is the author of the monograph ‘Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible’.

Orlando Lovell was born in London and raised in Berlin. After her foundation course at Central Saint Martins College in London, she studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven, visiting Hyperwerk at FHNW in Basel for an exchange semester in between. She worked at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, for the eating designer Marije Vogelzang and was editor of The DIFD (Dutch Institute of Food and Design). She has exhibited in Austria, Portugal, Netherlands and more.

They are both co-founders and co-editors of The Common Table, a platform for food futures and systemic change.

An exclusive interview with designer Virgil Abloh and Gorden Wagener, chief design officer of Daimler AG for Wallpaper magazine, ostensibly about their G-Wagen artwork collaboration but also about waning aspirations of ownership, the meaning of luxury and how recent global events have affected their perspectives as designers. Abloh also designed the limited-edition cover of the issue.

“At the beginning of 2020, Mercedes-Benz offered Wallpaper* a preview of a new collaborative art project it was working on, due for launch later this year. The raw material was its four-decade-old, classic SUV series the G-Class, or G-Wagen, as it is also known. The collaborators were Gorden Wagener, the brand’s chief design officer, and Virgil Abloh, the designer, architect, entrepreneur, DJ, artist, artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear and CEO of his own fashion label, Off-White.

This collaboration is quite a coup for the carmaker. The resulting piece, to be unveiled this autumn, is called Project Geländewagen (Geländewagen is German for ‘terrain vehicle’, from which the G-Wagen gets its name).

Abloh has become one of the world’s hottest designers in recent years. Originally trained as an engineer and architect, he works across a whole range of media, but specifically with brands, their products and where they interact with popular culture. He has been called an ‘arch appropriator’ and indeed he does specialise in editing existing objects or tropes. Give him the core parameters of a brand, product, object or form typology and he will deconstruct and realign their narratives, making them ‘of the now’ by endowing them with new context – both historical and contemporary. This is not so much appropriation as an understanding and continuation of the cultural fractioning that defines our post-postmodern world: editing and remixing what went before. Brands such as Nike, Evian, Ikea and Vitra love Abloh for this fluency, not to mention the potential access he brings to a younger global generation also adept at growing new contexts from fragmented sources and re-expressing them in a language of emojis, memes, acronyms and filters.

This is a generation that, despite its love of appropriation and its ease with commodification, is becoming increasingly distanced from aspirations of ownership of large possessions – such as cars…”

Read the full article here.

lovell_studio are four-dimensional thinkers offering consultation in transformative strategic context building through the medium of digital and print publication.

lovell_studio use their interdisciplinary experience in the fields of design, architecture and food to help reposition brands towards a regenerative, ethical, big-picture future.

lovell_studio combine their holistic approach with their worldwide network of collaborators, enabling them to develop sustainable solutions across a range of media.

sophie(at)studiolovell.com

Sophie Lovell is delighted and honoured to be featured in the new film “Rams” by the documentary filmmaker Gary Hustwit (“Helvetica”, “Objectified”, “Urbanized”). The film premiered in October 2018 and will be available on general release in early 2019.

“Rams includes in-depth conversations with Dieter, and dive deep into his philosophy, his process, and his inspirations. But one of the most interesting parts of Dieter’s story is that he now looks back on his career with some regret. “If I had to do it over again, I would not want to be a designer,” he said. “There are too many unnecessary products in this world.” Dieter has long been an advocate for the ideas of environmental consciousness and long-lasting products. He’s dismayed by today’s unsustainable world of over-consumption, where ‘design’ has been reduced to a meaningless marketing buzzword.

“Rams is a design documentary, but it’s also a rumination on consumerism, materialism, and sustainability. Dieter’s philosophy is about more than just design, it’s about a way to live. It’s about getting rid of distractions and visual clutter, and just living with what you need.”

Rams, 2018, 74 minutes
Produced and Directed by Gary Hustwit
Original Music by Brian Eno

Featuring: Dieter Rams, Mark Adams, Fritz Frenkler, Naoto Fukasawa, Klaus Klemp, Ingeborg Kracht-Rams, Mateo Kries, Sophie Lovell, Dietrich Lubs

Executive Producer: Jessica Edwards
Director of Photography: Luke Geissbühler
Editor: Kayla Sklar
Additional Photography: Fred Burns, Gary Hustwit, Ben Wolf
Sound Recording: Mike Dielhenn, Luca Torrente
Titles and Motion Graphics: Trollbäck & Co.

“We live in challenging times. There is no denying that portents pertaining to the “end of the world” are writ large all around. Yet despite the implied drama of “apocalypse”, the reality is actually far more mundane and surviving it is not about building bunkers, it is about building resilience.”

With essays, interviews and projects by young practitioners and experts alike, Volume 5 of the Archifutures series for the Future Architecture platform deconstructs and remoulds the notion of “apocalypse”; to neutralise its drama and to reconsider what it means to live in an age of revelation. What are the futures that these young practitioners aim to reveal? What are the new prototypical mechanisms of resilience and survival under construction as we speak? How will they manifest themselves in the built environment?

Archifutures Vol. 5: Apocalypse has seven sections with seven guidelines intended as a provocation for architects to share them, work with them, improve them, and above all use them to help build a better future for all of us:

Everyday End of the World: Climate change, resource shortages, disasters and mass migration: for millions around the world living under apocalyptic conditions is an everyday reality. We all need to recognise that fact and adapt our thinking accordingly.

Adapt and Survive: The reality of the apocalyptic condition is quite mundane. Surviving it is not about building bunkers, it is about changing our approach and building resilience in an everyday way. This is where architects come in.

Radical Hope: Reactionary politics relies on a pessimistic view of the future. It is an inflexible stance that does not encourage new solutions. To hope for a better future is thus a radical act. Real change can only come with hope.

Between Consensus and Dissent: An ongoing apocalyptic process requires constant negotiation. If reached, consensus may not last. But dissent and conflict are two different things. There are many benefits to agreeing to disagree.

Progressive Degrowth: The deconstruction of inefficient and exploitative systems in the present is much better than reconstruction after they have failed. Growth can no longer be the ultimate aim. It’s time for us to acknowledge and embrace the limits.

Interdependent Individuality: The technologies of the digital age are not inherently problematic, they are tools that can be used for oppression, but also empowerment. They. We can recode and redistribute our technological intelligence into technological agency.

Our Futures: The Apocalypse is typically understood as a radical moment of change, after which things will never be the same. Architects must seize this apocalyptic moment to help construct new futures for everyone.

Contributors include:  Bora Baboci, Maite Borjabad, Eduardo Cassina, Trajna Collective, DOMA, Liva Dudareva, Stefan Gruber, Jason Hilgefort, METASITU, Anh-Linh Ngo, Phi, RESOLVE, Skrei, Anastassia Smirnova, Space Transcribers, TAB Collective, Tania Tovar Torres, Stephan Trüby, the Unfolding Pavilion team and many more.

About Archifutures

Archifutures is the publishing project accompanying and expanding upon the Future Architecture platform, a Europe-wide network and EU-funded initiative set up by the Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana. It features projects and initiatives from young practices supported by the network as well as contributions from more established voices that are helping to shape the architecture, cities and societies of tomorrow. The ongoing Archifutures series is a truly European collaboration: originally conceived, edited and designed by the publishing collective &beyond, it has now evolved into a pioneering digital and print project masterminded by dpr–barcelona, publishers and Future Architecture platform members. It merges the possibilities of critical editorial work, innovative printing and active user intervention allowing readers to select texts from the series online, according to individual interest, and order their own custom compilations.

archifutures.org

Science, technology, architecture and philosophy all find their way into the art of Tomás Saraceno. Whether in arachnid experiments or aerial cities, he has called for a radical transformation of our relationship with each other and the planet. Ahead of his largest exhibition to date, we visit Saraceno in Berlin … to witness the launch of an airborne sculpture for the Aerocene project. Sophie Lovell, Wallpaper Germany Editor, tells the story.

“It’s August; Berlin, like most of Europe, is in the grip of a major heatwave. If global warming predictions are correct, this summer is but a teaser for weather extremes to come. It’s 6 a.m. and already too hot. And the Wallpaper* team are en route to join the Aerocene crew at a large lake in Brandenburg near the Polish border for the scheduled launch of their first solar hybrid balloon for the ‘Around the World’ project.

Tomás Saraceno first ‘launched’ his Aerocene project in Paris in December 2015, parallel to the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference COP21. The plan was to create a series of diaphanous sculptural volumes ‘inflated by the air, lifted by the sun and carried by the wind’, designed to circumnavigate the globe by hitching a ride on jet streams ‘without the burning of fossil fuels, without using solar panels, batteries, helium, hydrogen or other rare gases’.

Since then, Aerocene has grown into an independent foundation dedicated to ‘increasing public awareness of global resource circulation’ and fostering ‘a common imaginary towards new ways of co-inhabiting the earth’. It explores the potential for air travel and perhaps even a new way of life in the clouds, completely independent from fossil fuels and national borders, thus standing in collaboration, not competition with other species with which we share the planet.

If your goal is to build castles in the air, then you have to start with your feet on the ground. The Aerocene Foundation and its on-site staff of around ten people share facilities with Studio Tomás Saraceno but are independent from it. The foundation is supported by grants, donations and sponsorships (Audemars Piguet, for example, is supporting an Aerocene symposium series and workshops at the Palais de Tokyo this October, and later in December at Art Basel Miami Beach). This core team is connected to a steadily growing global community of enthusiasts and participants, whose contributions range from technical support and design to flight tracking and conducting their own flights and experiments. The results are then all shared open-source as a form of creative communing. ‘It’s becoming more and more like an NGO’, says Erik Vogler, technical advisor and head of production design.

As a way of broadening their research, Aerocene has created around 40 ‘Aerocene Explorer’ backpacks. Anyone can request to borrow one of the backpacks, which contains all the tools you need to conduct your own solar-powered tethered flight. Individuals and groups are encouraged to do whatever they want with the kits: from hacking them to adding software and hardware, or creating dance performances, music or poetry around them. Alternatively, people can also build their own Explorer kits from instructions available on the website. When they are done, they share their results with Aerocene and the community, then hand the backpacks on to whoever wants one next. ‘What’s interesting’, says Aerocene communications manager Camilla Berggren, ‘is that if people damage the balloons, they are encouraged to repair them themselves. As the balloons get more used they gain all these marks from stitches and tape, which build history into the sculptures and make them belong to the community even more’. The aim of all this sharing is to grow the knowledge base of what can be done with solar-powered, free-floating technology.

Back in Brandenburg, the temperature has climbed well into the 30s as we finally locate the Aerocene aeronauts camped lakeside, down a long forest track in a place where Google maps remains obstinately offline. Their tensile tree tents are strung between the pine trees looking, appropriately enough, like spider webs in the morning sun. People are swimming and breakfasting, and some are fiddling with various pieces of equipment and cameras. There also seems to be some kind of discussion going on, since the forest warden just came by and made it clear that they are not supposed to be camping here. Nevertheless, the balloons are set up and a couple of canoes are pulled up on the little beach, ready to tow the new ‘Around the World’ hybrid prototype out into the lake for the launch. Nobody seems in much of a hurry, although it is now after 10am and solar-powered flight is greatly improved if you can catch the maximum hours of daylight before dark. Then, just as it looks like things are going to take off, the police turn up. More discussion ensues, accompanied by taking down of particulars. The 25 or so Aerocene crew and community on site break camp and trek back through the forest to pick up the rest of the vehicles and move to the giant public beach on the other side of the lake. About three hours later we are all sitting on this beach next to a leisure boat hire shop, drinking cold beer and eating lunch. Somebody is playing a guitar. The sand is so hot it burns our feet. It looks for all the world like a scene from Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. All that’s missing are the beanie hats.

The test launch we are all here to witness and participate in is for ‘a solar hybrid balloon designed to fly night and day around the world’, explains Erik Vogler, ‘carried by a helium carrier to get data about temperature developments and behaviour.’ The sculpture (as he calls it) itself is a cuboid gossamer fabric bag made of Kopa foil that is usually used for transistors, along with three helium-filled SPS-13 balloons. A shiny metallic radar reflector was hung below, along with a Pecan Pico 10.b tracker and solar cell. This enabled the sculpture to send live photos and positioning via APRS radio waves back to the earth to be captured by the team monitoring it from the ground.

The person that seems to be working hardest all day is a community volunteer called Sven Steudte, whose day job is something to do with satellite technology. Together with another volunteer, Thomas Krahn, he designed the tracker attached to the balloons and all the software connected to it. Saraceno is plying him with cold Coca Cola as he sweats over his laptop monitoring the path of the Around the World device, hooking up with a community of Polish radio hams called Radio Sondypolska, who are helping with the tracking. Later at nightfall, they lose contact with the sculpture just east of Warsaw travelling at 12,000 metres through the lower stratosphere. ‘It may have dropped to the ground’, says an apparently unconcerned Vogler two days later, ‘or it may keep going, circumnavigating the earth.’ They will know when someone picks up contact with it via the radar reflector again, or finds it on the ground and returns it to the address written on a label attached.

Once the launch has been celebrated and we lose sight of the prototype in the glare of the afternoon sun, the team decides to unpack one of the huge black Explorer balloons. They fill it with air after much comical running up and down the beach between families with their picnics and inflatable toys. Saraceno then tows the giant black quivering pyramid out onto the lake in a canoe, ties a couple of GoPros to it and releases it into the afternoon sky. But heat clouds have now formed above us, and after a brief glorious surge, the balloon sinks gently beyond the far side of the lake.

So Aerocene is a utopian art investigation, a social experiment, an educational project, an exercise in collaboration and community-building. But how much scientific innovation is really involved? Ballooning has been a thing for over 300 years. So surely Google’s Loon project, ESA, NASA or other research institutions, with investment in the millions, are way beyond floating fabric bags into the sky with trackers attached?  ‘There are a few projects doing high-altitude ballooning in the stratosphere, but not many just use the heat of the sun’, says Vogler, ‘The French space agency CNES had their MIR (Montgolfière infrarouge) balloons that were also heated by the sun, able to fly overnight and catch the earth’s radiation, but they stopped the project.’ By not using helium or fossil fuels, he says Aerocene are developing a whole new category of ballooning. They are also trying to connect those advantages to other endeavours, encouraging meteorological stations, for example to switch from helium-filled balloons to fossil-free alternatives (helium is a by-product of fossil fuel extraction). The fact that helium was used in the Around the World solar sculpture ‘was a special case’ says Vogler, ‘because following the legacy of CNES, we need to find out how to keep flying overnight and collect data. The helium carrier allowed the extension of this experiment.’

Also, Vogler says, by developing their own soft and hardware at a tiny scale instead of docking onto the research of big companies like Google, they are showing that ‘You can also do it. We try to motivate people to create workshops and build their own devices. If you are going too fast with technologies that are high profile, the you are cutting out a lot of people from the opportunity to participate in this project.’ Inclusivity, it seems, is the primary driver for the Aerecene project: enabling ordinary people to feel like they can make a difference.

It is late afternoon. We leave the team earnestly discussing a rescue mission across the lake using pedaloes from the boat hire shop, and head back to Berlin. When our grandchildren ask where we were at the dawn of the Age of the Aerocene, we can say that we were there – and it was fun.

For his latest documentary “Rams”, “Helvetica” director Gary Hustwit has turned his lens on reluctant design hero Dieter Rams. Sophie Lovell, who interviewed Rams when he was one of our inaugural guest editors in 2007 and participated in the film, picks up the thread.

A conversation between Sophie Lovell and Dieter Rams in the book Legacy: Generations of Creatives in Dialogue, edited by Lukas Feireiss.

The design and architecture editor Sophie Lovell is the author of the biography Dieter Rams: As little design as possible (2011). She has spent many hours talking to and interviewing the German industrial designer and shares here for the first time a transcription of one of their conversations about German design, design politics, Buckminster Fuller, pollution, the environment and our obsession with “things”.

Sophie Lovell spoke to Georgian artist Andro Wekua for Wallpaper magazine about war, work and wandering.

‘Andro Wekua’s Berlin studio is located on a curve of the river Spree near the Tiergarten park behind the KPM porcelain manufactory headquarters. This used to be quite a backwater, a bit of an ignored unspace until recently, but escalating property prices and proximity to the river have turned it into prime real estate turf. The studio is in the remains of an old red brick building, a surviving wing of a larger industrial complex, its original intended context obliterated during the war. It is surrounded by seven construction sites with billboards advertising future coworking spaces and relocation invitations. As he shows me up to his atelier on the second floor above a small printing works and opposite Angela Bulloch’s studio, Wekua explains he doesn’t expect to be here much longer: “the owner is here almost every day with potential buyers”, but he doesn’t seem unduly concerned.

The inside of the studio is quite a surprise. I’ve been invited to interview an artist with three upcoming solo shows in The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Sprüth Magers Berlin and the Kunsthalle Zurich respectively. Wekua is just 40 years old but has been well known in the art world since his early twenties. The New York MoMA and the Saatchi Gallery have several of his pieces and he is represented internationally by both Sprüth Magers and The Gladstone Gallery. He may not be a top gun quite yet, but he is not far off.  Other big-name artists based in Berlin, such as Tomas Saraceno, Ai Weiwei or Olafur Eliasson have giant studio factories with dozens of staff, but the main work room here is almost empty save for a number of modestly-sized paintings in progress propped against the white walls and a couple of tables covered in half squeezed tubes of oil paint and colour smears. The air is thick with the comforting aroma of turpentine. There are two chairs, which look like they came out of a skip, and a crate of bottled water. There are no assistants scurrying around, no sign of hectic preparation for the shows, just the artist on his own, offering a glass of water and apologising for not having anything else to drink. The word “spartan” comes to mind.

Wekua explains, almost apologetically, that this isn’t his only studio, just the one that he paints in at the moment and that he has sent his two assistants home for the day. His sculptural works are all made at the Kunstbetrieb workshops in Basel and his films in anther specialist place Zürich. He seems to be constantly on the move, dividing his time between Berlin, Basel, Zürich and, more recently, his country of birth: Georgia. I ask him which place feels most like home for him and he answers: “So far I have had no problem living in different places with but I am starting to realise it would be good to decide – not geographically, but so I am not scattered all over the world the whole time. As you get older you start to get a bit tired and it is difficult for the people working for you. Also when the kids start to go to school you have to make decisions.”

Perhaps this state of permanent transit is why the studio space feels rather impersonal, more like a hotel room than a home. He has personalised it only with the coloured oily tracks his fingers have smeared on the walls around each unfinished artwork. The dozen or so paintings, on the other hand, seem deeply personal, portraits mostly, bursting with vibrant yellows, reds, pinks and blues. He explains to me his work process for them: “I collect personal photos or ask friends for them – this is of someone I knew; this is me when I was young – but it doesn’t matter who they are, they may as well be strangers.” Wekua then sketches in collage using the photos along with coloured paper, cut and torn. “An aspect of collage that I find fascinating”, he explains, “is that I believe that time is not necessarily a linear thing. The elements within them stem from different times and different places, but one can still depict them in an integrated way.” When he is happy with the result, he sends the images off to a screen printer who scales them up and prints them on canvas or, in the case of the pictures here, sheet aluminium and the artist then works over the prints in oils, adding and subtracting and overpainting until he is content. Wekua again emphasises his distance from the subject matter, most of which look extremely intimate somehow, like family portraits: “it does not play a big role for me who they are”, he says, “these are not portraits, they are figures. There is a hardness about them, but it also interests me that there is a deeper narrative quality too”.

Painting is only a part of Wekua’s oeuvre. His powerful sculptural work often features life-like, life-sized androgynous adolescent figures made of wax and other materials. One piece for his upcoming shows (he has as yet to decide what pieces will go where) is of teenaged-looking figure with a huge black wolf nudging at her shoulder. Another is of a figure standing in a 3 x 5 metre pool with water circulating through her and coming out of various body parts, such as shoulder and hands, like a fountain.Wekua also makes films, the most well-known of which, Never Sleep with a Strawberry in Your Mouth (2010), features yet more uncanny, android-like figures, this time played by humans, in a strangely magical realist domestic setting. Then there are the architectural models, seemingly accurate but constructed partly from memory, of buildings from his former hometown. What appears to connect them all is a strong sense of intensely personal storytelling.

I ask him about the girl and the wolf, a theme that repeats itself in his sculptures. I explain that, for me and perhaps many others it is a motif dripping with storytelling symbolism: Little Red Riding Hood, Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke or one of the Stark children from Game of Thrones. The figure is both innocent and warrior. But Wekua is adamant that storytelling is not his intent: “They stand for something, but not someone. It is a feeling about a universal condition that moves me and is what I want to represent, so I express it in one or another form. But that is not a story. If viewers want to make stories out of my work or see stories in it I think that is of course cool, but it would be great if they could get a sense of that condition as well.” He does not go on to elucidate what that condition might be.

More tellingly perhaps, Wekua’s own back-story is always related in articles about his work and by his galleries. It is as if his refusal to admit to a narrative in his work, automatically drives others to forcibly attach his own one to him.  He was born in 1977 in Sukhumi, by the Black Sea in Georgia, a region riven by war, civil war and occupation. In 1989 his father, a political activist was killed by Abkhaz nationalists during the Sukhumi riots. His family fled the city and at the age of 17 he was sent on an exchange to an anthroposophic school in Basel, Switzerland. “It was during the 1990s. Those were bad times in Georgia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union there was huge chaos. Nothing functioned anymore. Nevertheless, it was still a good time for me, I had a lot of fun and was outside a lot. But for my mother and others if there was a chance to get out and go somewhere else, it had to be taken. I did not want to leave.” Switzerland was a culture shock, “especially after all that chaos. It was quite depressing for me at the beginning and I was really alone.”

Wekua says he did not actively choose art as a profession either: “I never knew what I wanted to be. I drew a great deal as a child, so when I was 11 or 12 my father took me to a painter friend of his in Georgia who had a great studio, just like you imagine an old-fashioned atelier to be. I ended up going there twice a week. When he painted, I painted as well. It all sort of just came together. I did not set out to become an artist”.

We move on to talk about in-between spaces, like the location of his Berlin studio. He once stated that he is are interested in the “blurry material that holds things together”. In a city such as Berlin, it is precisely such in-between spaces that have allowed the creative scene to grow and evolve. They fall between the rules as well, so there is freedom to invent, to create something new.  I ask if that is what drew him to the city and again he replies in a self-contained manner: “For me it is the spaces in between that are important, but I can make my space anywhere because I carry everything I need with me.” But what, I ask, of the non-physical gaps? The spaces where emotions and memories and dreams exist? The human mind has a fantastic ability to imaginatively fill in the spaces left by its often-flawed sensory system. “Where I grew up in Georgia,” he answers, “it’s very different now from what it was. War and civil war and occupation have changed it massively and much of what I knew in my childhood is not there anymore. Also, you imagine things differently to what they were. You fill in the gaps with your imagination. My work is about closing these gaps.”

When he is working, the names for Wekua’s pieces come last of all. At the time of writing two weeks before the first of the three upcoming shows, most of the works for them are still nameless. By naming them he will be ascribing potential for meaning and he seems reluctant to do so: “Then there is no going back”, he says, “I think names are important. But then again some of my works don’t have a name even when they are done, even though I have tried to give them one.”

Despite his self-professed aim to close gaps, there is one yawning chasm he opens up between himself and his works when they are completed: he says he detaches himself from them completely. “As soon as my work is exhibited somewhere then that is where the relationship stops”, he explains. “The work is not an ambassador for my ideas, it becomes autonomous. When I see my work in an exhibition, I am just as much an observer as you are. If the work is not able to take on a life of its own and if I don’t feel like an observer, then it doesn’t leave the studio.”

Most interviewers tend to ascribe an air of mystery to Andro Wekua but in our meeting he comes across as an intelligent, contemplative person struggling a little to express himself, quite understandably, in what is his third or fourth language. Which artist likes to answer the question: what is your work about? Or: what was your intention? Wekua is an explorer examining the gaps between the perceived and the all too real. Memory, time, and the non-linearity of how it is stored are all of interest to him. Yet he has experienced family loss at a young age, war, loss of homeland, culture shock and loneliness and his work also reflects a great deal of processing. His professed disinterest in the protagonists in his works, his dismissal of the autobiographical and his ultimate detachment from his creations may be self-protective but it seems more likely that he does not want his work to be defined by his own circumstances by western critics constantly flagging up his migrant, warzone background. So he is guarded and careful and rightly so.

But Wekua is an artist, and an increasingly famous one at that. As such he has willingly entered a realm where feelings and thoughts become, by definition, public property because he is putting them on display. Gallerists, journalists and fans alike pick him and his work apart for every scrap they can get. Perhaps, being so wrapped up in the creation of his art, he genuinely cannot see what he is revealing with it: alienation, melancholy, loneliness, isolation. Like when you have a strong dream and it fills your head so much with the feeling of having experienced a cinematic fairy tale of epic proportions. But the moment you wake up and try and tell someone your dream, the magic disappears: it becomes an analysable set of images and symbols spouted by your subconscious – and it allows the person you tell it to read you, to interpret you. When the interview is over, we start to chat about lucid dreaming and his eyes light up.’