Designer - Shapers of our everyday lives
Their names are Archille Castiglioni, Arne Jacobsen, Ettore Sottass Jr., Gunnar Aagaard Andersen, Poul Henningsen, Philippe Starck or Studio DDL, to name just a few examples, and they have gathered in the TAGWERC Design STORE because they all have or had two professions: Designer and visionary pioneers in interior design.
Designer are the designers of our everyday lives. Sometimes their designs are plain, almost simple, other times eccentric, perfectly formed or functional and always somehow special and a reflection of their individual personality. In the field of interior design, the development of designs often takes place in the context of certain styles. Bauhaus, Pop Art, Functionalism and Radical Design are just some of the design styles that have influenced Designer in its work. A special Designer in the development of lights was Poul Henningsen. Using mathematical formulas, the Dane, who had completed his architectural studies without a degree, calculated a so-called three-shade luminaire concept that provided absolutely glare-free light and could be operated for the first time with almost all light sources commonly used at the time.
Visions that see the light of day
A luminaire is something different for everyone. Lighting requirements can really vary widely. Some use it as functional basic lighting or orientation light, as functional light, for purely aesthetic reasons or as an eye-catcher in a room. Designer , on the other hand, create lights that take all aspects into account and are much more than mere light sources. As beautifully described in the movie "The Devil Wears Prada" using the example of fashion design, it is the Designer who first bring a vision into the world that later finds itself on the mass market's rummage tables. Take, for example, the "YaYaHo" rope system from Ingo Maurer. The lighting designer developed a cable system equipped with low-voltage technology. The special feature: A wide variety of lighting objects could simply be placed on the wire system and illuminated. An absolute novelty at the time. Subsequently copied many times to this day.
Aesthetics in everyday life
Of course, a simple uplighter or any old folding chair will also serve its purpose. But design is usually about much more. Designer looks beyond the practical and gives objects a special design language, a unique style: aesthetics in everyday life.
Different approaches
Verner Panton believed that it was better to sit on a chair whose color you liked and incorporated the findings of color psychology into the design of entire restaurants, living landscapes and other spaces - mostly commissioned works - the best example being the Visiona 2 materials exhibition for the Bayer chemicals group. Gunnar Aagaard Andersen had already discovered colors and shapes for himself long before, but was more of a free spirit, an artist whose work emerged from him and his experimentation with new materials. In the early 1960s, for example, he developed what he called a "portrait of his mother's Chesterfield chair" based on polyurethane foam, a piece assembled from layers of brown foam armchair. Unusual, unique, each chair is one of a kind and can be admired in the permanent design exhibition at Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Design is in the air
But where does Designer get its inspiration from? Sometimes it is art, a cultural context, an everyday experience, perhaps also favored by the achievements of industry and technology, which make production as a mass product possible in the first place, although the creative form is no longer a new one. Design never emerges detached from time and space, but is sometimes "in the air" or is the logical consequence of a certain epoch and is embedded in a cultural context. Sometimes it is simply commissions or competitions, which in turn promise commissions, that give rise to design. Because even Designer have to pay electricity bills, need a steady income and should not die in beauty.
"The details are not just details."
Ray and Charles Eames therefore did not see their design mission during their lifetime as furnishing the elite. Rather, the American design (married) couple wanted to make the masses happy with their design ideas. "The role of the designer is that of a good, considerate host who appreciates the needs of his guests," Charles Eames was convinced. And so the Designer approached the process of redesigning the lounge chair or the fiberglass chairs, known today as the Plastic Sidechair and Plastic Armchair, for example, in a very classic way, taking into account and specifying the problem and the clientele at the end of which a model or prototype with all its details was created. Charles Eames: "The details are not just details. They make the design." Perhaps it was precisely because of their universally friendly and everyday approach that Ray and Charles Eames' designs became so popular and are still at home in many households today - albeit in the slightly better-off ones. Today, you have to shell out a good 200 euros for the entry-level model of a Plastic Sidechair. The price for a Lounge Chair is even in the mid four-digit range.
Investment design
Design has long since become a new investment, from whose boom many already deceased Designer legendary design classics certainly no longer benefit. And yet Designer live on in their designs - even if they are sometimes modified or adapted in size and color to the needs of a changing society. Nevertheless, these adaptations do not seem to detract from the actual design created by Designer . "Good design is like being able to fly to the moon. Only a few will ever be able to do it directly, but the awareness of this possibility has changed the lives of millions of people", Ettore Sottsass Jr. put it in a nutshell.
Living room of the Designer
At TAGWERC, some special Designer have been given a living room. Here you can experience their ideas and find inspiration for your own home. We will therefore conclude this short essay with a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: "Perfection is obviously not achieved when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away."