The Empire Strikes Back: Vienna Design Week

Austria’s empire might be long gone, but its former imperial might is still writ large in its capital's grandiose imperial architecture. In the contemporary, global scheme of things, of course, Vienna isn’t that big. And certainly for the author of this piece, who made an almost direct passage at the end of September from the London Design Festival to Vienna Design Week, there was less ground to cover in the city of coffee houses and prancing horses than on the island.

That said, it’s highly fertile ground, where unbridled (no pun intended) creativity meets a virtuosity of craftsmanship. And size isn’t everything, as they are wont to say. It may operate on a limited budget, but VDW as design showcase punches well above its weight.

Macro/Micro
A particular conceptual strand of this year’s tenth-anniversary edition of VDW was that of scale and the relation between the individual element and the whole. Just as the festival’s showrooms and other exhibition sites located throughout the city (its so-called Passionswege) together formed a design topography to be encountered either by plan or chance, so Czech artist Maxim Velčovský’s City Shades installation at the VDW Festivalzentrale cleverly applied the technique of shadow theatre to compositions of differently sized and formed chandelier parts and drinking glasses to create intriguing dioramas of Vienna, Moscow and New York’s cityscapes. Backlit, the J & L Lobmeyr-made glass elements cast shadows that represented, at turns, a number of the city’s iconic architectural landmarks, including the Stephansdom and its giant ferris wheel.

British design duo Fredrikson Stallard, meanwhile, collaborated with Swarovski to create a striking, four-metre-high installation in the midst of the Belvedere Palace’s baroque splendour. Entitled Prologue, the site-specific piece, comprising over 8,000 gold- and topaz-coloured crystals, took the form of a large, lens-like structure, which communicated the idea of the pleasure of the gaze as much as its individual, shimmering elements invited optical feasting.

Actual lenses were deployed as part of Slovenian designer David Tavcar’s collaboration with petit-point craft-manufacturer Maria Stransky in their small workshop in the city. Drawing on the handicraft skills of the in-house embroiderers, whose work can contain up to 2,500 stitches per inch, Tavar showed his ‘zoomed-in’ reworking of classic Stransky motifs, such as roses and violets, under a series of magnifying glasses – turning the figurative and classical into the abstract and contemporary.

Tafelspitz
Vienna’s cultural assets aren’t limited to the exuberance of its architecture or its tradition of craftsmanship in furniture. It’s also present in bourgeois rituals of the everyday. Eating and drinking in the Austrian capital have traditionally been taken very seriously and the material culture around such activities has, over centuries, testified to this. Think silver tableware and porcelain.

With its subtly subversive and often very humorous table-set compositions, made up of labour-intensive, hand-worked elements and objets trouvés, Austrian design duo zerunianandweisz’s Fremdes Vogel collection, shown at the Festivalzentrale, was developed together with Roma craftspeople in a Transylvanian coppersmith’s and came with tongue firmly placed in cheek. On the same festival site, in an installation reminiscent of the classic tea salon, Vienna-based studio Polka curated the new gastro porcelain collection they have designed for tea purveyors Demmers Teehaus. Various tea-service elements were brought together to form a tiered composition, its form referencing that staple object type of bourgeois conviviality – the cake stand.

In its city showroom, meanwhile, Wiener Silber Manufactur exhibited highlights from the past ten years of Passionswege, including its beautifully rational, yet highly expressive, Tea Service by Spanish-born, London-based Tomás Alonso. Also on show was its ice-sheathed champagne bucket by French designer Alexandre Echasseriau, which in turn makes reference to the jagged form of glaciers and mountains.

Traces
You can’t move in Vienna without tripping over the rich creativity and craft artistry of its development. The various historical layers of the city’s architectural and material-cultural heritage – among them the Baroque, Jugendstil and Modernist – underpin it and define it. Traces of the past surface in the present, for example its old shop signage, still perceptible amidst the visual noise of international consumer brands.

A number of VDW’s exhibitors played with the notion of traces, too. London-based designer Martino Gamper’s prototype collection of glasses for former glassware and chandelier purveyor to the royal court J & L Lobmeyr, exhibited in the latter’s opulent showroom, featured a highly graphic intervention on a familiar object type – the tumbler. Deploying a number of traditional Lobmeyr techniques, such as cutting, engraving, polishing, sand-blasting, hand-painting and gilding, Gamper left an emphatically contemporary mark on a simple, quasi anonymous form.

At the Festivalzentrale, meanwhile, home-grown Viennese design studio mischer’traxler exhibited their archly kinetic Isochrone installation. Commissioned by Schloss Hollenegg to explore the subject of slowness, their work consisted of a large, constantly swinging pendulum, whose base moved across a multi-layered table top, each swing removing more of the latter’s surface, resulting in an ever-growing, bowl-shaped, colour-stratified indentation. It was nothing for those into instant gratification.

But there was certainly nothing slow about the neon-light project that Dutch design pair rENs presented at the city workshop of Neon Kunze. In collaboration with the long-established, Vienna signage and lighting producers, the designers showed their fascinating experimentations with colour nuances and different light effects, close inspection by visitors allowing them to see the actual traces of gases racing around the various, specially designed glass tubes.


Highly illuminating stuff. Like Vienna Design Week itself.

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