Germany

'Design is not about solving technical problems or only about beauty,' says lighting planner extraordinaire Ulrike Brandi. 'It's a social profession and we have very big challenges right now", she adds.

Videos

From November 25-27, 2022, Driving the Human realizes a three-day festival marking the culmination of three years of collaboration, research and experimentation connecting disciplines between sciences and the arts.

With Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, the Chinese avantgarde in architecture, research and teaching, product and interior design has arrived in Europe. In the exhibition Reflective Nostalgia, Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu are convincing in the way they examine the historical and the contemporary as well as the listed and the everyday and to transform them into new uses in a respectful and future-oriented manner. In addition to their numerous conversions and new buildings in Asia, such as residential and office buildings, theatres, shops or, for example, a chapel and a whisky distillery, the exhibition also shows projects from Europe, including a restaurant in Paris, a hotel in London and the expansion of the creative quarter Cologne-Ehrenfeld with an office building. Neri&Hu also design products and showrooms for international companies, thus demonstrating their diverse skills and the quality of their work in all scales and disciplines. With design confidence, they create exciting, sometimes surprising spatial constellations – from found and recycled materials or building parts of the respective location and by adding new elements. Historicising set pieces are omitted, while the charm and character of the 'old' remains legible and tangible and thus identity-forming in Neri&Hu's positive reinterpretation of the nostalgic. Their transdisciplinary design approach is in the DNA of the studio. As early as 2004, they were co-founders of Design Republic, a multidisciplinary design platform in Shanghai. The success of the broad spectrum of their work is reflected in numerous international awards. They currently teach at the Yale School of Architecture and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Rossana Hu was also appointed Chair of the Department of Architecture at Tongji University in Shanghai in 2021. The exhibition installation features architectural models, photographs and videos, as well as a selection of furniture. Neri&Hu's alternative reading of historical contexts, including all the contradictions and details, as well as the unexpected spatial compositions with which they respond to them in a magnificent way, can be experienced.

The Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried will show 34 photographs by Michael Nguyen in an exhibition. Martinsried is one of the two science suburbs of Munich, a district of the municipality of Planegg in the district of Munich in Bavaria. The exhibition, which take place in the foyer of the Institute, “build a bridge between science and arts”. The exhibition shows works from 2020 - 2022. Michael Nguyen shows architectural objects, plays of light and shadow, reflections and architectures captured in various cities across Europe.