Hasta La Ideas

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img src=”http://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/2010/04/karlsfountain.jpg” width=”468″ height=”663″ alt=”karlsfountain.jpg”//p

pemPictured above, Tom Palofsky’s Zinfandel shelf and Felicitas Wetzel’s Fontana Adria fountain./em/p

pa href=”http://kkaarrlls.com/”emKkarrlls/em/a is a new collection of limited edition pieces produced by students and faculty from the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Germany. They launched their first editions last year at the Milan Furniture Fair and continue with their secondmdahsh;we discovered it by chance on our way to 5.5./p

pAccording to the show’s introductory essay, the designers behind the collection are unified “in their basis in an entirely and extremely unconventional design approach,” with ideas stemming from “an absolutely unprejudiced view of the world of objects and its coherence.” This is not an uncommon claim, true (and not true) of many designers who exhibited in Milan this year. But, to their credit, the emKkkarrlls/em collection held together very well, with equal amounts of strangeness and familiarity. /p

pTake, for instance, one of our favorite pieces of the show, emFontana Adria/em by Felicitas Wetzel, made from a steel waste-bin, trash bag, and pump. Though a bit heavy-handed as a critical object (commenting on environmental technologies and azure paradises), it mixes banality with surprise to produce an original effect./p

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pAlso striking were Laura Jungmann’s experiments with tar. Her F0fm10s collection explores the material properties of tar at different temperatures. In her ceiling lamp, a swath of tar slowly drips down the side of a glass vessel, creating an “aesthetically long-lived object.” /p

pTom Powlofsky’s Zinfandel shelf was another favorite: by inserting plastic boxes into a foam mesh, a storage shelf is created, resting on the mounds formed by its soft structure./p

pMany more projects from Kkaarrlls after the jump, and pics of the show too!/pa href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/milan10/milan_design_week_2010_kkaarrlls__16427.asp”(more…)/a
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