Twilight series

These Books were my most recent read , i found them very interesting and full of great imagery and the story leaves you wanting to keep reading all the way through.

Deconstructivism

Deconstructivism in architecture, also called deconstruction, is a development of postmodern architecture that began in the late 1980s. It is characterized by ideas of fragmentation, an interest in manipulating ideas of a structure’s surface or skin, non-rectilinear shapes which serve to distort and dislocate some of the elements of architecture, such as structure and envelope. The finished visual appearance of buildings that exhibit the many deconstructivist “styles” is characterised by a stimulating unpredictability and a controlled chaos.

Important events in the history of the deconstructivist movement include the 1982 Parc de la Villette architectural design competition (especially the entry from Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman[1] and Bernard Tschumi’s winning entry), the Museum of Modern Art’s 1988 Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition in New York, organized by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, and the 1989 opening of the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, designed by Peter Eisenman. The New York exhibition featured works by Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au, and Bernard Tschumi. Since the exhibition, many of the architects who were associated with Deconstructivism have distanced themselves from the term. Nonetheless, the term has stuck and has now, in fact, come to embrace a general trend within contemporary architecture.

Bauhaus

Bauhaus Design

mies van der rohe

bauhaus designs

Mies Van der Rohe

Bauhaus designs

Marcel Breuer

Bauhaus movement

The Bauhaus is one of the most important Design Movements in the twentieth century. It took place in Germany of the 1920s and early 1930s, the period of the Weimar Republic, an area considered one of the birthplaces of the Modern Movement in architecture and design.

The impact of the horrible experiences in the First World War, poverty and inflation created a new consciousness, which influenced strongly Design, Architecture and Art. This was the age of the Bauhaus, a movement which was a reaction to social change and which aspired an aesthetic relevance.

The “New Man” became the ideal, a concept that also expressed itself in living. The Bauhaus Design showed a purism with emphasis on straight edges and smooth, slim forms. The rooms were sparsely furnished, but filled with hygienic freshness. Superfluous features were taboo. Shining steel was discovered as a material for furniture.

Furniture

A principle of the Bauhaus was to serve the development of contemporary housing, from the most basic household equipment to the complete house. Walter Gropius, the director of the Bauhaus, was convinced, “that houses and their furnishings must have a meaningful relation to each other and aims to derive the form of every object from its natural functions and limitations, by means of systematic experimentation.”

The Bauhaus designers were fascinated by metal. Although metal has been employed for the frames of chairs since antiquity, it was surprising that the avant-garde metal furniture were greeted with consternation. The furniture looked so differently from the traditional style, that the masses could not relate to them.

For the Bauhaus designers metal or tubular steel was lighter, cheaper, less bulky and more hygienic than the traditional upholstered furniture. The idea behind this new aesthetics was to built cheap and beautiful homes, were the cool and durable materials of the furniture would create a new type of beauty. Steel has a natural elasticity. And steel had the added advantage of a certain uniformity. It gives the impression of a psychological and aesthetic purity. The formal transformation of chairs and sofas by the use of a framework of resilient metal or steel is a clear characteristic. Also beauty emanates from the furniture because of their exact forms and measurements, a kind of “Magic of precision”.

Marcel Breuer

Marcel Breuer, whose Wassily Chair is one of the famous examples of the Bauhaus furniture, was in charge of the carpentry workshop. Breuer said, that he first got the idea for using tubular steel in furniture design from his beloved Adler bicycle, whose strength and lightness impressed him. The Wassily Chair, named after the painter Wassily Kandinsky, for whose quarters in Dessau it was originally designed, is a reworking of the traditional club chair. It reveals the influence of the Dutch modernist Gerrit Rietveld, in its arrangements of bisecting horizontal and vertical planes.

Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier’s ideas of furniture were simple and to the point. He said for example, “… a chair is a machine for sitting on.” And the “machine concept” is shown clearly in some of his famous furniture designs. The so called LC4, the ultimate “Rest Machine” is one of the most comfortable Lounge Chairs ever built. The seat is held by elastic supports, which has led to new and unusual forms. Everything is dominated by smooth, elegant lines.

Mies van der Rohe

The furniture designs by Mies van der Rohe are among the most influential in the twentieth century. Van der Rohe’s furniture are connected to his architectural designs and correspond closely to the architectural concept. They compliment the interiors of his buildings. Mies designed furniture only for a relative short time (1927 to 1932), but nevertheless are among the most influential of the modernist movement. Especially the Barcelona chair, designed for the German Pavilion in Barcelona, became a Symbol for the elegance of avant-garde living.

bauhaus

Zeng Jian

Born in Shanghai in 1925, Zeng later studied with some of China’s leading academics in interior design at St. John’s University, a hothouse for the ideas of Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus.
Upon graduating in 1947, Zeng joined Richard Paulick, a German-Jewish refugee in Shanghai teaching at St. John’s, in designing contemporary furniture. Until 1949 he worked in Paulick’s Modern Homes office, designing custom-made furniture for Shanghai’s rich and famous. Rong Yiren, who later became known as China’s “Red Capitalist” and was much later vice president, was a client. “Our design in 1947 was high in quality and high in price,” Zeng said.

Two years later, when the Communist Party came to power, Zeng moved on to work in the state sector, becoming a member of the Huadong Institute, an interior design studio under the Ministry of Construction. With nationalization came a different style of furniture, and the functionalism of Bauhaus was replaced by the new Soviet style. “The Soviets taught us to do interior design with ornamentation and at that time we accepted such ideas,” Zeng said. “And we became conservative.”

In 1959, Zeng was asked to design the furniture for Mao Zedong’s private residences in Hangzhou, in southern Zhejiang province and in Zhongnanhai, the walled Beijing complex where the party and government are headquartered. It was a great challenge, he said. All the designs had to be submitted first to Mao’s advisory group, which ordered “big furniture.” Armchairs, for example, had to be 60 centimeters (23.5 inches) wide. Up until then the largest width had been 54 centimeters. “They said Chairman Mao was a big man, but I said that no human being could sit comfortably in a chair 60 centimeters wide,” he said, gesturing with his elbows the difficulties even a large person would have. “But they said it had to be big to show it was for a great man.”

As relations with the Soviet Union soured in 1960, China became increasingly closed off to the outside world. International interior design magazines could no longer be found and contacts with designers abroad were cut off.

When Mao died in 1976, Zeng’s services were again needed, for the furniture for Mao’s mausoleum on Tiananmen Square. It was a high-security job that lasted 10 months. He also designed the underground laboratory furniture for doctors who regularly work on restoring Mao’s body.

When the country finally opened its doors again to the outside world, in 1978, China’s interior design movement suffered a backlash from 20 years in isolation. “We were locked up for so long,” Zeng said. “We couldn’t know what was happening in the outside world.”

But the economic boom of the 1980s brought new developments in China’s design industry. Interior architects were absorbed into the construction frenzy. Design shops sprouted up around the country as Chinese with more money to spend sought to make their homes more comfortable. Today, China has an estimated 200,000 interior designers, of which only 10 percent have Zeng’s high level of training.

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Some of my Favourite mag’s

Grafik


Eye

Magazine Types

There are many types of magazines that fall into lots of different category’s each to suit the need of the buyer some of the category’s are as follows:
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