Hasta La Ideas

This high chair by Vienna designers Patrycja Domanska and Felix Gieselmann gives coffeehouse patrons a view over the heads of others.

Entitled Homage to Karl, the chair is designed in tribute to Austrian author Karl Kraus, who is said to have written much of his literature in Viennese cafes whilst observing day-to-day activity.

The chair was presented during Vienna Design Week 2011 as part of the coffeehouse exhibition The Great Viennese Café: A Laboratory, to which eight designers contributed furniture and objects.

Sitters climb a wooden ladder to get onto the chair and can place their drinks onto or inside two attached boxes that also serve as an armrest.

You can see more stories from Vienna Design Week here, including another temporary coffeehouse.

Here’s a little more text from the designers:

“Homage to Karl” by Patrycja Domanska and Felix Gieselmann

Initiated by the Museum of Applied Arts Vienna (MAK) Patrycja Domanska and Felix Gieselmann designed for the exhibition and temporary coffee house “THE GREAT VIENNESE CAFÉ: A LABORATORY. Phase II and Experimental Design” an unusual, single piece of furniture  in remembrance of Karl Kraus’s coffeehouse-based self-discovery and other experiences:

The Viennese coffee house is a special institution, whose meaning outreaches the sum of its coffee variations.

Who held something on himself, sat down not only in the coffee house to write, but also to correspond to the picture of a contemporary author. Owing to their written documentations of that environment, the coffee house has the value of a cultural heritage.

“Homage to Karl” is a study of this microcosm and translates that narcissism in view of the topical context of the scene coffee house and his liven by the visitors. The literary descriptions of the approach and selfrepresentation of the belletrists are used as a basis and are turned to the homage to them and their meaning for the institution of the coffee house.

The raised hide creates moments of selfstaging but also offers the possibility of the retreat, both caused by the rise of the seat. Not only the actual position of viewer and looked are put in a new tension relation, but also their points of view to each other are in a new composition.

A personal field serves for the preservation of private objects as well as as a table and allows by his mirrored surface, on the one hand, tohis user, on the other hand, also to the surrounding people a constant back coupling of the own appearance.

Vienna Design Week 2011: a rotating arm deposits spirals of quartz sand on the showroom floor at crystal company Lobmeyr in Vienna this week, thanks to Canadian designer Philippe Malouin.

The Time Elapsed installation moves in precise hypotrochoid patterns, gradually building up a ring of sand over the course of the week.

Resembling a scaled-up chandelier component, the intricate machine was manufactured by Lobmeyr’s craftsmen in Austria according to Malouin’s design, right down to the detailing of the screw heads.

Malouin collaborated with Lobmeyr as part of the Passionswege project, where Vienna Design Week commissions young designers to collaborate with traditional and highly skilled Viennese companies.

Lobmeyr have participated in Passionswege every year, collaborating with Mark Braun, Claesson Koivisto Rune and Maxim Velčovský in past years.

Vienna Design Week continues until 9 October. See all our stories about the event here.

See all our stories about Malouin’s work, including our own offices, here.

Here are some more details from Malouin:

Time is a quality that makes Lobmeyr so special.

Not only do their glass objects posses timeless designs, independent of changing fashions, but the calibre of the crystal itself means they stand the test of time. Great investments of time are taken in producing and decorating the crystalware, up to 100 hours for a single object, and this investment differentiates Lobmeyr from other glass manufacturers. We have used the theme of time here to illustrate how unique Lobmeyr is.

The flow of sand through an hourglass is traditionally used to keep track of elapsed time. It is also physical representation of the fine line between the past and the future. Through the machine in this room, the deposition of sand forms not minutes and hours on a clock face but abstract and changing patterns, illustrating the link between time and decoration. The sand also holds a physical connection with Lobmeyr, since it is the raw material from which the crystal is created.

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The Hourglass by Marc Newson for Ikepod	Night Night by Vanessa Hordies	Sand by Yukihiro Kaneuchi

Vienna Design Week 2011: Austrian designer Konstantin Schmölzer has squeezed a wooden tower into the space between a green wall and glass atrium at Jean Nouvel’s Sofitel hotel for Vienna Design Week. Watch the movie »

The project was commissioned by Vienna Design Week as part of the Passionswege project that pairs young designers with established Viennese companies, in this case gardening firm Verdarium.

Vienna Design Week continues until 9 October. See all our coverage of the event in our special category.

Here are some more details from Konstantin Schmölzer:

Concept

A dialog about contemporary stability and new, nostalgic values resulted in the search for a space, which could reflect in a decent manner on this common demand.

Situated between a modern way of constructing and urban gardening a new landscape is found. A phenomena of working / living in a high-rise often is that one falls in a mood of observation, analytics and self consciousness. Taking a well established product, designed in different times exactly for this purpose, out of its archived context and placing it into this new scenario creates a counter object, which tries to bring this atmosphere down to earth and realize it more coherent.

Event

Konstantin Schmölzer at Verdarium
Passionswege
Fr 30.09.–Sa 8.10.2011

Location

Between
Nouvel-Tower, Sofitel, Stilwerk, Verdarium (by Jean Nouvel) & Patrick Blanc Vertical Garden

Credits
Vienna Design Week
Verdarium
Tischlerei Pascher
Konstantin Schmölzer

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Tree House by Ravnikar Potokar	Outlandia by Malcolm Fraser	Takasugi-an by Terunobu Fujimori

Vienna Design Week 2011: Vienna Design Week opens tomorrow and local designer Thomas Feichtner will present his chair with a seat suspended at the centre of a cubic oak frame.

The M3 Chair measures one metre on each side, with diagonal struts connecting the outer corners to its square seat.

Produced in the workshops of Austrian company Neue Wiener Werkstätte, the chair will be on show at Theresiengasse 6, 1180 Vienna. Here’s a film about the making of the chair:

Watch this movie on Dezeen Screen »

More coverage of Vienna Design Week to come – meanwhile you can watch a preview film on Dezeen Screen.

Thomas Feichtner will also appear on Dezeen Platform at Dezeen Space on 12 October – see the ful lineup here.

The details below are from Thomas Feichtner:

M3 Chair -Thomas Feichtner

For Vienna Design Week 2011, Neue Wiener Werkstätte will be showing the M3 Chair developed specifically for this exhibition by Austrian designer Thomas Feichtner. This unique object will be juxtaposed with the mass-produced FX10 Lounge Chair, an earlier work by Feichtner which has since become a classic of Austrian design. While these two pieces share a geometric theme, the M3 Chair exhibits an open, wooden cantilever construction that contrasts with the closed body of the Lounge Chair. The installation highlights not only the tension between closed and open, heavy and light, surface and line, and mass-production and the single copy, but also the symbiosis between traditional workmanship and contemporary design. These pieces thus embody Neue Wiener Werkstätte’s ideal of hand-producing technically perfect individual products built to last generations, furniture designed to guarantee historical recognizability—the perfect union of hand-craftsmanship, tradition and design.

Liberated from the demands normally made on a mass-produced item, this design experiments with functionality, structural engineering and material. Both its back and its armrests are mere tangents of the construction, the functions of which are only discovered via actual use. With a seating surface floating within the construction and legs extending far to the sides, the M3 is most assuredly not a chair that saves space—it is much rather one which creates a space. The dimensions of the M3 measure one cubic meter, standing for a conscious way of appropriating one’s own space. Hence the “m3” reference in the name M3 Chair. It is only via the chair that the open space is defined.

The chair is made of one and only one material: oak. This is a conscious choice of materials, harkening back to the woodworking tradition upheld by furniture workshops of yore. The wood renders the chair’s light construction a static experiment which could only succeed in a handmade, unique item. Like many works by Feichtner, the M3 is to be understood as an artistic and experimental examination of design removed from industry and mass-production, as art and design placed in interdisciplinary dialog with one another. The M3 experiment is particularly well-suited to showing that design can free itself from the doctrine of the purely objective and is not automatically obligated to serve industrial utility. It represents a catalyst for the discussion of various positions. The M3 is a contribution to the design festival of the City of Vienna.

Thomas Feichtner was born in Brazil in 1970. After attending school in Düsseldorf, Germany, he earned a degree at the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz, Austria, where he also became an instructor a few years later. After completing studies in industrial design, he founded his own design office. Feichtner initially designed industrial goods and numerous products for the Austrian sports industry, and was honoured with international design awards like the IF Design Award, the Swiss Design Prize, the Cannes Lion (nomination), the German Design Prize, the red dot design award, the European Design Award and the Josef Binder Award. Besides his activity as a product designer for Head, Tyrolia, Fischer and Blizzard, Feichtner also worked in the area of visual communications for the likes of Swarovski Optik, Adidas Eyewear or the British-Israeli designer Ron Arad.

His later work focused on artistic aspects and took a more experimental approach. In search of an independent mode of operation that went beyond globalization and mass production, he designed products for such traditional crafters as J&L Lobmeyr, Neue Wiener Werkstätten, Wiener Silber Manufactur, Augarten Porzellanmanufaktur and Stamm, and realised freelance projects in cooperation with Vitra and FSB. International exhibitions at the Triennale di Milano, the National Gallery in Prague, the Biennial of Industrial Design in Ljubljana, the Design Center Stuttgart, the Gansevoort Gallery in New York, Design Week in Tokyo as well as the Museum for Applied Arts (MAK) in Vienna followed. His works have been acquired by various design collections. Feichtner is a professor for product design at the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel, Germany. He lives and works in Vienna with his wife Simone Feichtner.

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Drawing Lamp by Thomas Feichtner	Moon by Tokujin Yoshioka	Attitude Chair by Deger Cengiz