CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/19/2014

Konstantin Grcic: Panorama

In Panorama, the catalog to Vitra Design Museum's compelling current exhibition, influential German industrial designer Konstantin Grcic writes, "Over the years, an 'archive of things' has accumulated in my studio. Scattered among my own design projects are other objects, references, materials, personal finds, artworks. They are arranged in a row, like a game of dominoes. Their order is based on a simple logic: one object tells a story that refers to the next object, which in turn is linked to the story of the following one, and so forth. There is no chronology, just a continuous sequence of freely associated narratives. The relationships are subjective and could also work in a different order. For me, this principle reflects a familiar process: inspiration comes from the dynamic interaction of things. The vitrine is a cosmos of knowledge and ideas. Taken as a whole, it represents a part of my biography." Describing the works in this image Grcic writes, "We discovered that there are thousands of stacking chairs on the market, but almost no stackable bar stools. And the stacking feature is not only relevant for the user, it is also practical and economical with regard to production, warehousing and transport. From a technical standpoint, the orange-and-black stool would be rejected as a by-product that occurs when colors are changed during a production run. The photo of construction workers with the MIURA stool was published in a small volume of images shot by Florian Böhm in New York City in the summer of 2006. Portable construction lamps served as models for MAYDAY (Flos, 1999). Incidentally, construction sites with the craziest, most imaginative and beautiful lighting objects are found in Japan."