Danny Venlet – Interior Architect & Designer

It is difficult to compete with the beauty of trees, with their tall grandeur and high tops. And yet, the ambition of the Parckdesign project call lies in the challenge to use urban furniture to emphasise the age-old bond between man and nature, between his artificial interventions and his relationship with plants and flora. Placed in a contemporary context, park furniture expresses the desire to experiment, to test, and to value and discover green spaces in a quest for a more specific identity.

Vision was designed in 1986 by Pierre Mazairac and Karel Boonzaaijer based on the philosophy that a cabinet, as a composition, should be part of the architecture. Partly due to its maximum flexibility of use and extremely modest design, this design was very successful from the outset with the Dutch manufacturer Pastoe. 25 years later, the compositional possibilities remain unlimited: from a three-dimensional relief to a graphic grid of lines and planes, from a series of sideboards to an architectural landscape of volumes. The book Vision – Room for imagination sketches the story of this young classic.

The work of self-proclaimed ex-designer Martí Guixé (°1964) can aptly be described as ‘beyond design’. Creating new objects he finds rather ‘superfluous’ and ‘boring’; he prefers to concentrate on ideas, systems and living matter such as food and human behaviour. As a ‘global designer’, Guixé constantly travels back and forth between Berlin and his native Barcelona, analyses situations, rituals and movements and proposes radical solutions with a minimum of ergonomics – simple, immaterial, humorous and often iconoclastic.