2011/06/27

365 knitting clock by Siren Elise Wilhelmsen -Inspiration - SYD 004

photo by Miriam Lehnart

The 365 Knitting Clock by Siren Elise Wilhelmsen is another knitting nancy based object, and it is completely different to superblues life size sitting sculpture.  Siren, a Norwegian product designer, residing in Berlin, designed this clock, measuring time through the length of the knitting. Each day one round is knitted and at the end of the year a two meter long scarf has been created. Knitting for the patient but also a very poetic way of measuring time.

photo by Miriam Lehnart


I love the idea and it also makes a little shiver run down my spine.  Maybe your time is up if you miss putting in a new ball of yarn at the end of the year? It reminds me of the story of the Norns- the legendary beings spinning the thread of the fate of human kind.
Mehr Zeit - more time (photo by Miriam Lehnart)

2011/06/15

Inspiration BS003 – look-alikes

While i had my daily look through some design blogs i came across the lamp fishermen by the Swedish architects TAF. It caught my attention because it immediately brought up a lot of varying associations reaching from dodgy fish restaurants to nice holidays at the baltic sea coast, where you can sometimes find these glass balls used by fishermen to keep the tips of their nets above the water. When i started thinking about this and how such a simple design can bring up so many stories i wondered about other designs that i had seen and remembered because of a similar link to other objects.


image by TAF Arkitektkontor
Another designer that imediatly came to my head was Julia Reischel who was a lovely flatmate of mine in Rotterdam. Her lamp Jack also got a maritime look-alike: the buoy. But it does not only takes the shape as an inspiration but also uses the tilting movement of a buoy as a mechanism to swich on and dim the light.
image by Julia Reischel

A different take on the subject was made by Mieke Meijer from Vij5 designers who did not
make a product resembling some other object but created a material that carries the aesthetics of wood and takes the ecological value even further. Her newspaper wood is made of old newspaper that is glued together and sanded to reveal the lines that are such a distinctive attribute associated with wood. It can be used almost like wood, to build furniture or anything else that is thought of.
image by Vij5

2011/06/07

Three lines and a fold travels 001 - Buchstabenmuseum Berlin



I am back from my three week holiday in Germany. Three weeks of beautiful spring weather, hanging out with my most favourite Architects, lots of long chats with coffee and wine and a little bit of much missed European culture.

I spent a fair bit of time in Berlin and I finally managed to visit the Buchstabenmuseum and saw their collection of letters.
It is located in the 'Berlin Caree' building close to Alexanderplatz. This old shopping mall is a very unlikely building for a museum. Its full of slightly trashy GDR nostalgia shops including a a supermarket selling ex GDR products. The supermarket was frequented by quite a few pensioners, who looked like straight out of 'Goodbye Lenin' - bizarre.

The museum itself is located in what looks like a former tanning salon. The smallish rooms are crammed full with letters leaning against walls or piled up on the floor. They seem strangely obsolete and useless.




So many Ss, what to do with them?


Berliners might know the iconic 'Zierfische' sign, formerly advertising a fish shop at Frankfurter Tor was dismantled a while ago. It found its new home here as well as the ' Hauptbahnhof' sign formerly mounted on what is now called Ostbahnhof.