1970s Avant Garde Tableware from Villeroy & Boch

Designed by Helen von Boch in the early 1970s, Avant Garde is a set of stacking tableware for four persons that becomes a centerpiece for the the dining room, by forming a ball in different colors (brown, white, red brown). 19 pieces in total, including plates, side dishes and bowls in different sizes.

Avant Garde, 1971, by Helen von Boch, for Villeroy & Boch, Germany.
Available at Furniture Love (sold out)

The Tote Mumbai by Serie Architects

UK architects Chris Lee and Kapil Gupta of Serie Architects have designed ‘The Tote’, a banquet hall, restaurant and bar. Their brief was to incorporate a series of disused buildings from the city’s colonial past set within the Mumbai race course and convert them to form a series of restaurant and bars.
The interesting aspect of the site, however, lied not in the colonial buildings but in the open spaces covered by mature rain trees. These spaces are shaded throughout the year by the thinly wide spread leaves of the rain trees, allowing almost the entire proposed program to occur outdoors.
The interior of the lounge bar on the upper level is an intricate arrangement of 3-dimensional, faceted wooden panelling, acoustically treated with sound proofing material. The pattern of the panelling is a series of trees with intersecting branches.

The Tote, Mumbai, India, by Serie Architects
via: designboom

Soil Cutlery by Vladimir Rachev

By creating cutlery inspired by gardening tools, London-based Vladimir Rachev wants to remind us of the origins of our food. Rachev’s fear is that soon we will be unable to associate our food with the earth.

Soil Cutlery, by Vladimir Rachev, via: mocoloco

Books: Vision in Motion by László Moholy-Nagy

“As a painter, typographer, photographer, stage designer, and architect, Moholy was one of the most creative intelligences of our time.”
– Herbert Read

One of the great innovators of the European avant-garde, László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) is best known for his affiliation with the famous Bauhaus school in Germany, where he taught from 1923-28. In 1937, at the invitation of Walter Paepcke, the Chairman of the Container Corporation of America, Moholy-Nagy moved to Chicago to become the director of the New Bauhaus. The philosophy of the school was basically unchanged from that of the original, and its headquarters was the Prairie Avenue mansion that architect Richard Morris Hunt designed for department store magnate Marshall Field.
Unfortunately, the school lost the financial backing of its supporters after only a single academic year and it closed in 1938. Paepcke, however, continued his own support, and in 1939, Moholy-Nagy opened the School of Design. In 1944, this became the Institute of Design, located in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s, Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

“Design has many connotations. It is the organization of materials and processes in the most productive, economic way, in a harmonious balance of all elements necessary for a certain function. It is not a matter of façade, of mere external appearance; rather it is the essence of products and institutions, penetrating and comprehensive. Designing is a complex and intricate task. It is integration of technological, social and economic requirements, biological necessities, and the psychophysical effects of materials, shape, color, volume, and space: thinking in relationships. The designer must see the periphery as well as the core, the immediate and the ultimate, at least in the biological sense. He must anchor his special job in the complex whole. The designer must be trained not only in the use of materials and various skills, but also in appreciation of organic functions and planning. He must know that design is indivisible, that the internal and external characteristics of a dish, a chair, a table, a machine, painting, sculpture are not to be separated. The idea of design and the profession of the designer has to be transformed from the notion of a specialist function into a generally valid attitude of resourcefulness and inventiveness which allows projects to be seen not in isolation but in relationship with the need of the individual and the community. One cannot simply lift out any subject matter from the complexity of life and try to handle it as an independent unit.”
(Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 1947)

“There is design in organization of emotional experiences, in family life, in labor relations, in city planning, in working together as civilized human beings. Ultimately all problems of design merge into one great problem: ‘design for life’. In a healthy society this design for life will encourage every profession and vocation to play its part since the degree of relatedness in all their work gives to any civilization its quality. This implies that it is desirable that everyone should solve his special task with the wide scope of a true “designer” with the new urge to integrated relationships. It further implies that there is no hierarchy of the arts, painting photography, music, poetry, sculpture, architecture, nor of any other fields such as industrial design. They are equally valid departures toward the fusion of function and content in design.”
(Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 1947)

An exhaustive visual compendium of the modern movement, circa 1947. Includes many examples of Bauhaus and the New Bauhaus (Institute of Design). Designers, photographers, architects and artists represented in this volume are a cross-section of the 20th-century modern movement: Alvar Aalto, Berenice Abbot, Jean Arp, Willie Baumeister, Herbert Bayer, Max Bill, Marcel Breuer, Robert Brownjohn, Le Corbusier, Theo van Doesburg, Henry Dreyfuss, Naum Gabo, Morton Goldsholl, Juan Gris, Walter Gropius, Raoul Hausmann, Kasimir Malevich, Herbert Matter, Mies van der Rohe, Piet Mondrian, Richard Neutra, Ben Nicholson, Paul Rand, Bernard Rodofsky, Ladislav Sutnar, Angelo Testa, James Prestini, Frank Lloyd Wright and many others.

Vision in Motion: László Moholy-Nagy, Hardcover, 9″ x 11″, 376 pages, 440 illustrations (11 in color). Book Design and Typography by the Author. Rare and Out of Print.

Buy it here: Amazon

Light Space Modulator by László Moholy-Nagy

Like many émigrés fleeing from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, László Moholy-Nagy sought refuge in various countries: the Netherlands, England and, finally, the United States. Wherever he and his family went, they took an enormous metal and glass machine, which looked so odd that it always caused a rumpus at customs. The problem was describing what it was. Telling the truth did not work. Custom officers snorted in disbelief when Mr. Moholy-Nagy explained that he had designed the Light Space Modulator, as the machine was called, to create pools of light and shadow so he could study their movement. They were almost as skeptical when he tried passing it off as a robot, fountain and mixing machine. Eventually he fobbed them off by claiming that it was “hairdressing equipment.”

Moholy-Nagy explains: This piece of lighting equipment is a device used for demonstrating both plays of light and manifestations of movement. The model consists of a cube-like body or box, 120 x 120 cm in size, with a circular opening (stage opening) at its front side. On the back of the panel, mounted around the opening are a number of yellow, green, blue, red, and white-toned electric bulbs (approximately 70 illuminating bulbs of 15 watts each, and 5 headlamps of 100 watts). Located inside the body, parallel to its front side, is a second panel; this panel too, bears a circular opening about which are mounted electric lightbulbs of different colors. In accordance with a predetermined plan, individual bulbs glow at different points. They illuminate a continually moving mechanism built of partly translucent, partly transparent, and partly fretted materials, in order to cause the best possible play of shadow formations on the back wall of the closed box. (When the demonstration occurs in a darkened space, the back wall of the box can be removed and the color and shadow projection shown on a screen of any chosen size behind the box.) The mechanism is supported by a circular platform on which a three-part mechanism is built. The dividing walls are made of transparent cellophane, and a metal wall made of vertical rods. Each of the three sectors of the framework accommodate a different, playful movement study, which individually goes into effect when it appears on the main disc revolving before the stage opening.

Light Space Modulator (1922- 1930), by László Moholy-Nagy, at Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity, at MoMa, New York. Flickr set: Markal
via: New York Times

Exhibition: Richard Mosse: The Fall

The Fall is a photographic survey of our historic unconscious. Richard Mosse travelled to intensely remote locations, from the Patagonian Andes to the Yukon Territories, and worked as an embed with the US military to produce work for this exhibition. The Fall is a rescue mission to try to locate our blasted sense of landscape and archeology, and reclaim the primeval waste for our imagination. Produced to an epic scale, each of the photographs in The Fall is a history painting for our times.

Richard Mosse, The Fall, November 19 - December 23, at Jack Shainman Gallery

Books: Chairs by Judith Miller

One of world’s most respected authorities on design and antiques, Judith Miller, presents a carefully curated selection of chairs and places them in their historical context. Nearly 400 years of chair designs are featured in chronological order, ranging from early antiques such as the 1680 Wainscot Chair and the 1740 Louis XV Chaise Longue, to modern day collectables such as Marc Newson’s 1988’s Embryo and Tom Dixon’s 2007 Wingback.
Beautifully Photographed in situ by Nick Pope, the chairs assume their iconic status; an occasional two-page spread shows incredible detail, revealing the craftsmanship and creative energy of the designer. The accompanying text for each chair gives a real insight into the thinking of the designer, historical facts, technical details, and places it in context to the manufacturing capabilities of its time, as well as identifying the period style to which the chair belongs.

“Sometimes I think you are unlikely to be a successful architect or designer unless you have designed a classic chair; and this is not just a contemporary phenomenon”.
- Terence Conran

Chairs: Judith Miller, Published by Conran Octopus, Hardback, Size: 28 x 25 cm, Pages: 336, ISBN: 9781840915235
Buy it here: Amazon

My Life in 80MQ - High Design/Low Budget Poliform Varenna

Italian furniture manufacturers Poliform Varenna has created an inspirational residential interior project called “My Life in 80m²” to show that the quality of a living space does not depend on the size.

My Life in 80m², by Poliform, via Contemporist

Books: Guido Mocafico: Movement

Time is naturally marked by repeating astronomical phenomena, by the daily cycle and the seasons, as nights and months come and go. To slice it into finer fractions, our forbears invented sundials, which track the movement of the shadows projected by the sun, or clepsydra, hourglass-like devices that count time based on a consistent rate of water flow. But ever since 1657, when the first watch was created, we have used the oscillatory movements of a mechanical system to do that job. The photographer Guido Mocafico, whose previous books include Venenum, Medusa and Serpens, sets out in this new project, Movement, to observe these systems. He chose complex and rare mechanisms–physically mechanical rather than electronic–which led him into a world of traditional knowledge controlled by master watchmakers. To remove the back from one of their tiny creations is to plunge into an unknown world: these images of the tiny springs, levers, screws and gears that drive the hands of time forward, etched with the slightest texture possible and engraved in the smallest type possible, present an abiding mystery of the everyday, representative of all of the technologies we have come to take for granted. Mocafico was born in Switzerland in 1962. A specialist in still life, he works for international magazines such as Vogue, French Vogue, The Face and Wallpaper. Based in Paris, he has also undertaken numerous advertising campaigns for Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Clinique, Shiseido and Hermès.

Guido Mocafico: Movement, Edited by Patrick Remy. Text by François-Paul Journe, Stephen Forsey, Antoine Simonin. ISBN: 9783865214553
Buy it here: Amazon

Edward Sofa by Carlo Colombo for Poliform

A soft tufted sofa with plenty of right angles. Made from a flexible polyurethane core, leather or fabric, and a stainless steel base.

Edward Sofa, by Carlo Colombo, for Poliform