Global initiative to foster creativity and innovation
This September sees the arrival of the BE OPEN Sound Portal in Trafalgar Square as part of the tenth anniversary of the London Design Festival 2012. Situated within one of London’s most iconic public spaces, the BE OPEN Sound Portal is an entirely new kind of installation that focuses on the design that you can’t see – that of acoustics and sound – rather than visual spectacle.
Visitors to the current exhibition at London’s Barbican Centre on the Bauhuas would be forgiven for thinking that the Bauhaus was a style. The exhibition of course contained many beautiful objects in perspex boxes. There was some detailed explanation of the desire to respond to industrial production but there was no reference – apart from a few photographs of empty studios to the fundamental point. The Bauhaus was not a style – it was a school. Jean-Louis Cohen’s The Future of Architecture since 1889 addressed this issue in a fundamental way. He explains that the school rethought the relationship between art, design and architecture. The school championed the new principles of abstract art to challenge existing building forms and then under Hannes Meyer and Mies Van Der Rohe the shapes of cities.
A prize for achievements in design education
Sandberg Institute has been selected to win the BE OPEN Inside the Academy Prize, from a shortlist of six leading European design schools: La Cambre, Belgium; Ecole Cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL), Switzerland; Hochschule Basel, Switzerland; Konstfack, Stockholm, Sweden; Sandberg Institute Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Glasgow School of Art, UK.
BE OPEN Inside the Academy – a new platform to showcase and honour recent achievements in educational approaches – at Design Miami/ Basel
The next stop on BE OPEN’s worldwide tour is Basel, for Design Miami/ Basel 2012. A new platform – BE OPEN Inside the Academy – will showcase and honour recent achievements in educational approaches that promote real-world problem solving through creative design.
London Design Festival 2012
19-23 September
Trafalgar Square project
BE OPEN Sound Portal
Take a journey to the heart of acoustic creativity, through a portal in Trafalgar Square
This year BE OPEN, the new global initiative to foster creativity and innovation, and the London Design Festival are co-producing a project in Trafalgar Square that focuses on the idea of ‘design you can’t see’.
Salone del Mobile
Corriere della Sera
April 16, 2012
Un ponte creativo tra Europa e Russia “Cosi la scienza dialoga con il business”
Affari & Finanza
April 2, 2012
L’Italia del talento puo vincere la crisis
Affari & Finanza
April 2, 2012
Sociologist, journalist and author of over 20 books translated into various languages, ranging in subject from trends in consumption to social change. Founder of a Research and Strategic Institute – Future Concept Lab (1989). Mr. Morace is also Professor at Domus Academy and Milan’s Politecnico. He has participated in conventions and seminars in 22 countries worldwide.
Tim Abrahams is a former editor of Blueprint. He now writes for Icon, Architect’s Journal and RIBA Journal. He is also the owner of a digital publishing company and an advisor to major cultural institutions on their online strategy.
Everyone operating in the worlds of architecture, design and technology knows that the world has changed since 2008, but the job of identifying and describing exactly how is only just beginning to happen. It was the contention of the convener of the first BE OPEN conference, Francesco Morace, that three new relationships in the world of design had undergone a huge and important shift. Morace suggests that a fundamental realignment in thinking has occurred in over the issue of sustainability, the idea of happiness and perhaps most fundamentally the relationship between the local and the universal. These theories were tested by the inquiring minds of some of the leading figures in the design world.
Tim Abrahams is a former editor of Blueprint. He now writes for Icon, Architect’s Journal and RIBA Journal. He is also the owner of a digital publishing company and an advisor to major cultural institutions on their online strategy.
The most important object in the Freud Museum in London, where the great psychoanalyst lived for just one year before he died, is clearly his couch. Draped in Persian rugs and scattered with cushions, it is on the bohemian side of mid-20th century tastes. Although insignificant in size it is impossible not to look at the piece of furniture and not think of all the dreams that have been relayed there and the neuroses diagnosed. Given that Freudian analysis prioritises relations between the subject and their parents, the familial and domestic becomes the site of the fundamental debates of existence. The couch is not just important because of his historical significance but also because of its symbolism. Anne Leibovitz has photographed it and Louise Bourgeois has exhibited alongside it.
Russian art critic and expert on the 20th – 21st century art.
Russian design became widely acknowledged at the same period as Russian art, i.e., in the 1910-1920s. At that time the self-identifications of progressively minded Western and Russian artists had much in common: here and there the artists demonstrated a huge interest in new technologies, targeted the most unspecific audience and consequently aspired to achieve universal artistic solutions considering both economy and aesthetics. Yet, the imminent differences of the addressed audiences could not but draw a line between the Avant-garde practices in the West and in Russia.
