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News: Finnish furniture brand Artek has acquired the production facilities that were used by its co-founder Modernist architect Alvar Aalto to develop his signature bent wood furniture.

HKT Korhonen, a factory founded by Otto Korhonen near the Finnish city of Turku, has been used by Artek ever since the furniture company was founded by Aalto, his wife Aino, art promoter Maire Gullichsen and art historian Nils-Gustav Hahl in 1935.

After Artek was sold to the Swiss design brand Vitra in September, the new owners bought HKT Korhonen to maintain the continuity and further development of Aalto’s products.

“Under its new owner, Artek comes into contact with a significantly larger and more international market,” said a statement from the brand. “When the chain of operations also includes manufacture, production can be developed to better serve a continuously evolving and growing market.”

Artek’s core archive comprises Aalto’s birch wood furniture designs, which were originally created in cooperation with Otto Korhonen’s factory. These designs include Armchair 41 created for the Paimio Sanatorium that Aalto completed in 1932 and Stool 60, the much-copied classic that’s been in continuous production since 1933.

The statement adds that “a proprietary manufacturing company also offers a framework for product development at Artek.”In recent years the brand has been collaborating with high-profile contemporary designers, including Shigeru Ban and Naoto Fukasawa, to develop new products.

The buy-out by Vitra in September was intended to give Artek a more international presence. Speaking about the deal at the time, Artek CEO Mirkku Kullberg said: “The international dimension, which was a clear goal already in Artek’s founding manifesto of 1935, needed to be revitalised.”

Artek will make the next major presentation of its portfolio at the Stockholm Furniture Fair next week.

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developed his furniture appeared first on Dezeen.

Whether it’s hosting a house party or having clients come to your office, chances are you’ve dealt with giving out your network details—and you know it’s a bit of a pain. It can also be a security liability; with so many of your…

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Dezeen and MINI World Tour: graduate designer Martijn Van Strien explains that his range of coats made from single sheets of black tarpaulin are designed for an imagined future world where money and resources are in short supply.

Dystopian Brutalist Outerwear, which Van Strien exhibited at the Design Academy Eindhoven graduate show during Dutch Design Week last year, consists of five coats made out of cut sheets of folded tarpaulin.

“It’s a kind of trend forecast for a dystopian future that, when everything is not so great with the economic stuff that’s going on right now, we might be heading towards,” says Van Strien. “It will be cold; people will be unhappy; we’ll be living in buildings that are just grey blocks. These are coats that we could produce for people that don’t have a lot of money, when we don’t have a lot of materials, when a coat needs to last for a lifetime.”

Van Strien says he chose tarpaulin because it is cheap, resilient and simple to work with.

“[The coats] are all cut from a single piece of black tarpaulin,” he says. “You then have to weld the parts together with heat. In the front I’ve made closures with magnets and that’s pretty much it. This material is super easy to work with, you don’t need to finish it or anything and it will last forever.”

The coats were designed to provoke a reaction and make people think about where the world could be heading, Van Strien says.

“A lot of people feel a bit creeped out [by the coats] and that is the goal, that we think about how we’re handling our social malaise,” he explains. “I see myself as a fashion designer, so I’ve looked at this from a purely aesthetic point of view. But the thought behind it is something that I feel very strongly about. I never make a garment just because it’s pretty, it always has to tell a story.”

Despite being designed for a future that does not exist yet, Van Strien says he has been approached by a number of people interested in putting the coats into production.

“I was not planning on putting these coats into production when I first made them, it was just a statement,” he says. “But a couple of parties have come up and they asked me if I wanted to take them into production so now I’m considering it.”

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

The post Martijn Van Strien’s Dystopian Brutalist
Outerwear is “a kind of trend forecast” appeared first on Dezeen.

Le Studio O+A à San Francisco, a fait le design des bureaux de la start-up « Evernote », située à Redwood City en Californie. La décoration est colorée et boisée avec le slogan inscrit sur un tableau noir à l’entrée et le logo en bois : un éléphant. Plus de photos du lieu et des bureaux dans le suite de l’article.

This week’s job of the week on Dezeen Jobs is a position for an interior designer at the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany, which includes the five-storey VitraHaus showroom designed by Herzog & de Meuron (pictured). Visit the ad for full details or browse other architecture and design opportunities on Dezeen Jobs.

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at Vitra Campus appeared first on Dezeen.