Greenhouse is a separate space within the Stockholm Furniture Fair showcasing design school projects and up-and-coming designers, needless to say this is usually the most interesting place at the fair. All participants are selected by a jury, some of which have started out in the Greenhouse themselves, for example Jens Fager of this year’s jury. The stage for this year’s edition of the Greenhouse was designed by Note Design Studio.
Among the emerging talents this year there where a lot of already familiar names like the not-quite duo Erik Olovsson and Kyuhyung Cho, YOIN, Nestor Campos and Arash Eskafi. We have perviously seen Arash Eskafi’s Peter Saville inspired Berg in the context of the Negative Space exhibition. The Berg is essentially a type of dressboy for collecting clothes in a disorderly fashion.
New to us this year were among others Silje Nesdal and her modular storage system Linkki, the pastel colored chairs of Yuki Yoshikawa and the various works of M-S-D-S Studio. The first collection of Pettersen & Hein include table lamps, mirrors and small furnishings defying any clear categorization, blurring conventional notions of design and art, form and function. This was the second time came across Pettersen’s visionary work this year.
The student shows are also usually highlights of the SFF, KDAK and KHiB showed an impressive array of chairs, The Tomorrow Collective of School of Industrial Design of Lund University focused on researching and developing traditional methods for a sustainable future.
The most consistent display this year, by any account had to be Aalto University’s Ultramarine. The showcase consisted of 14 easychairs all painted in ultramarine and made from very thin 1,5mm airplane grade plywood. The material choice seems to be close to the heart of finish designers and keeping in line with the tradition of great Finish modernists such as Aalto himself and Wirkkala.
Much like last year Konstfack, one of Sweden’s premier art and design colleges, had a small but well conceived show, balancing formal aesthetics with experimental qualities, illustrated here by Daneil Reinius’ glass and silicone stool and Viktor Sundström’s paper and concrete stool.
Beckmans Collge of Design’s presentation ”Wrong Place, Wrong Time” introduced the product design class of 2015 and their speculations on what aesthetics and values will inform the products of tomorrow. We particularly liked Matilda Beckman’s ”How Dust This Feel?”. Contemplating consumerism and the finite resources of our planet, these furniture are created out of a mix of dust, glue and varnish.
Viktoria Kreipke has created a version of traditional intarsia techniques with a plywood cabinet and steel inlay. Erika Emerén’s lamp ”Enlightened Structure” is perhaps one of the most curious pieces in this exhibition, a more conceptual interpretation of the brief.
DeTOUR was one of two exhibitions by students of HDK this year. Unlike a lot of other student work this exhibition focused more specifically on different types of communicative contexts for design. Departing aesthetics of 3D rendering Andreas Remfeldt’s 3Di2Di3D is an object that seems closer to a digital reality than a material reality.
