About the exhibition:

Multiplicity shows the work of five studios based in several cities across Europe. The city has long been an inspirational place for designers and the exhibition explore the influence that the city has on the work of each studio involved.

The intention is to celebrate the city and its diversity as a source of inspiration for designers. Souvenirs, the urban landscape, local traditions, flea markets, they all play a role in making the city an important resource for ideas and a laboratory for design production.

Although most manufacturing centers are located outside the city (often even outside the country) the paradox is that designers continue to live in cities. Somehow the city seems necessary to culturally stimulate designers and help them to understand human needs and behaviors.

Recently, new possibilities for small-scale production have emerged, allowing designers and everyone else to produce things using on-line platforms.
For this exhibition each studio has worked on a specific project related to the city they live in, using web based software linked to CNC, laser cutting and 3D printing machines.

The objects and its digital instructions will be available to buy on-line, or download, during the time of the exhibition at the Ponoko gallery.

In parallel to the exhibition there will be a pop-up shop with selected memorabilia about several cities by Czech collective OKOLO.

On the picture you see Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret on Chandigarh's Lake Shukna in a pedal boat designed by Jeanneret.

Yes, during 1950s, when these modernist masters built whole new capital of Punjab state in India, Chandigarh, they designed everything from the master plan to furniture, manhole covers or pedal boats for the lake.

From 20 September to 29 October 2011 you can see exhibition called Le Corbusier & Pierre Jeanneret: The Chandigarh Project in Zürich Anton Meier gallery. We love this pedal boat , as well as ascetic Standard lamp, bot designed by Pierre Jeanneret.

These days are about Carlo Mollino very much. Our friends from Casa Mollino sent us this funny picture showing miniature Carlo Mollino going to Munich. And why Munich?

Because in Munich Haus der Kunst begins big retrospective of this master of the Italian design and life right now. Called Carlo Mollino, Maniera Moderna, the exhibition is curated by Wilfried Kuehn and supported by Fulvio and Napoleone Ferrari from Casa Mollino. Also our book on Mollino will be available in the museum shop there.

But it is not everything. The another exhibition is Carlo Mollino: Un Messaggio Dalla Camera Oscura showing his polaroids in the Vienna Kunsthalle until 25th September.

With our OKOLO Mollino book and big Domus coverage on Mollino in their latest issue, we are in the middle of the amazing "Mollino boom".

Many about this legendary man in our next articles.

Australian designers Daniel To and Emma Aiston are our good friends and collaborators. Last year they have created the special curated personal editorial for our Next Step magazine and this year they participate with some of their products in our upcoming London pop-up store.

During London Design Festival this September we will have our own curated shop as a part of the exhibition entitled Multiplicity and organized by designer, Oscar Diaz and his Federal Office project. More info about our London exhibition shop very soon...

This time about Daniel and Emma new collection of the small products for the desk. We love their precise and very specific style. New D.E. collection for 2011/2012 combines different materials into the group of desktop accessories that look like small functional sculptures. Cork, aluminum, acrylic, rubber, glass, timber or magnet create together very compact series of the small design treasures.

Come to our London pop-up and buy some of them. More info as soon as possible...

Contemporary Italian plastic chair? This question is the main concept of our small curated installation held this weekend at the Ahoj, Design! festival on the riverside in Prague.

Come to Rašínovo nábřeží and see old boat with the selling exhibition of the young designers, as well as special presentations, music concerts and our exhibition about contemporary Italian plastic chair.

More about the concept on the boat or next week on the blog here.

Today starts the group show called Velocypedia in Galerie NTK in The National Technical Library in Prague. Its curators Milan Mikuláštík and Lenka Kukurová have selected some of the most interesting artworks ranging sculptures, paintings, videos, installations as well as design and architecture on the theme of cycling.

OKOLO is represented there by the original poster concept called Design Ride, which shows curated selection of the bicycles creating in 20th and 21st centuries by some of the prolific interior designers. Bicycles by Jean Prouvé or Richard Sapper, among others, stand next to the designers famous furniture or lightning creations and create new contexts of their work. Everything on the minimalist drawings with the stories about the single bicycles.

Velocydepia, 4. 5.- 24. 5. 2011, Galerie NTK, National Technical Library, Technická 6, Prague

More about the project with detailed pictures after our Wood Style blog.

You now, how we like the early work of Ettore Sottsass (1917 - 2007). The guru of the Italian design worked in 1950s in the style of the specific colorful modernism on the edge of the period organic design and new creative attitudes of the 1960s and 1970s. This Sottsass work of the 1950s is very rare to see and is highly collectible now.

Now you can see it in Rotterdam, where is held the exhibition of artists`s objects in enamel, which he created in 1958. The exhibition is held until 1st May 2011. Called Enamels 1958, the show is curated by Fulvio and Napoleone Ferrari from Casa Mollino and is currently being held at the Kunsthal Rotterdam and features over 100 objects and drawings of his form studies with enamels from 1958.

We asked our friends Fulvio and Napoleone Ferrari from Casa Mollino to make a short interview about the exhibition, as well as about Sottsass work of 1950s. Here is it...

What about is the exhibition in Rotterdam Kunsthall exactly? What is the curatorial concept?
This group of objects is well representative of Sottsass work of the 1950s, a moment in which he was both an architect and a painter. The enamels are exactly the meeting point between the Sottsass designer and the Sottsass artist.

Is it the traveling exhibition?
The exhibition started in summer 2010 at Kulturhuset, Stockholm, and will travel. At the moment there are not yet fixed scheduled museums for the future.

What do visitors see there exactly?
The exhibition in Rotterdam brings together about 70 vintage plates and vases in enamel and wood, and about 40 original sketches and technical drawings hand painted by Sottsass.
The enamel works date from an exhibition in the "Il Sestante" gallery in Milan from November 1958, and further limited production by the gallery.

What is the typical for Sottsass enamels? What is the difference from his another work?
The technique makes them peculiar, while the idea behind them is in the line of Sottsass research work of those years.
The peculiarity of enamel consists in its vitreous nature which gives to colors a thickness, a material consistency. Colors are for this reason deep colors, not flat colors on a flat surface. Enamel is cooked in the oven at around 1000 degrees, each color at a different temperature. Originally the enamel is a powder, which before cooking in the oven has a different color from the final one. There are also impurities in the material, which after cooking, sometimes comes out in strange and impredictable effects. Enamel involves a very skilled artisanal work. Sottsass surely loved all these qualities and the magic that is involved in the process of making enamel.

What are the true moments of these pieces? In which point or idea is their artistic power?
In a way we can assimilate the enamel work to abstract painting, but in a particular sense. Sottsass was very intrigued by primitive civilizations and their ability in creating powerful symbolic systems of drawings and decorations and paintings. Like totems. Very often these symbologies refer to cosmological signs. Sottsass studied these antique civilizations and throughout all his life visited their ruins all over the world. He was fascinated by creating a universal language acting on human beings as the wind does, or the stars in the sky, or the aurora, the snow, fire, a tornado, the forest...
Sottsass had always been very conscious in not making design simply a matter of function but a mean to place "man" inside, in contact, with the universe. In his own words he is looking to create objects that "make a person feel alive, that suggest ideas and action, explain the past and the future, instruments and things that one can look at or use, with which is possible to live together".

What do you think? How important is this part of the Sottsass work for his later period and whole life?
There are several shapes or symbols that Sottsass will use for the rest of his life and work. For example that kind of red star on a plate or the shape of a particular wooden base.
When he was young he built up a vocabulary that he kept using.

Do you see in this work something like the predecessor of his postmodern period?
In the sense I was saying above, anyone of these little enamel vases is conceived as a totem just as Carlton bookcase is, for example. And then the use of colors is fundamental, even if the palette of colors is different, they are used in the same way, as an alphabet to define and give meanings to objects.

The Sottsass work of the 1950s is very interesting, but quite unknown. Can you mention another Sottsass design from this period?
Sottsass designed the first Italian computer for Olivetti company in 1958, for which he won the Compasso d'oro prize. His lamps for Arredoluce are also a significant project of those years. In the 1950s Sottsass began designing ceramics, the most consistent part of his work, for over 50 years he will design far over 1000 different vases.

And what about Sottsass work for the company called Rinnovel? Can you tell us what is it exactly?
Rinnovel was an Italian company based around Milan. In 1955 Domus published an article with aluminum objects (vases, bowls, boxes, little tables) produced by Rinnovel and distributed on the American market by a company called Raymore, owned by Richard Irving, a man who aimed at renewing and making "Modern" the design of objects for the house and that already commissioned Sottsass the design of ceramics, which where also produced in Italy.
The serie of aluminums make use of anodization to bring colors into the objects, their style can be put in relation with the "Spatialism", a movement of which Lucio Fontana was the most eminent protagonist in Milano, but for Sottsass also the ideas of Antoine Pevsner could be considered a strong reference.

Ettore Sottsass made some very nice interiors and reconstructions in Milan and Torino in 1950s. Does something exist in original state now? Can we see his furniture from the period somewhere? In some museums and so on?
Don't think that anyone of his interiors still remains, but it would be a beautiful surprise to find one. The publications on Domus magazine are the best sources to know his 1950s work. Some furniture were sold at auctions in recent years. It is a very rare work. Beaubourg in Paris owns some pieces.

And what about you? You are specialist on Carlo Mollino most. Are there some other your interests except Mollino and Sottsass?
Beside Carlo Mollino who takes the large majority of our work, and Sottsass, we are interested in Italian postwar design in general with some specific argument, as for example the furniture of Gabetti & Isola or the Italian lightings of the 1960s, to which we devoted studies and publications in the past.

Do you plan some exhibitions or another projects into the future?
The next most important project is a Carlo Mollino retrospective exhibition we are helping to organize at Haus der Kunst in Munich, for the period September 2011-January 2012.


Photos by Enzo Asaia, Courtesy of Kunsthal museum and Casa Mollino

Next to the successful exhibition The Retrospective of the Light at Designblok 2010, we had our own presentation called OKOLO Environment. There is a text about it.

The creative group of OKOLO presented an unconventional concept of a temporary boutique and gallery in one at Designblok 2010. Thus, our exhibition space represented an original view of various products and objects, the selection of which reflects all our fields of interest. OKOLO Environment offered a unique excursion into the diversity of human creativity, which will not be depicted only through our own products and creative projects, but also in an unusually wide spectrum of products ranging from a 1950s lamp to a Nike backpack, and exceptional Hermés prints. The artifacts that seemed unconnectable at first sight, expressed our profound style-setting perspective and represent the perfectly conceived curatorial environment of OKOLO.



In the interior, furnished by practical furniture designed by Martin Žampach and Klára Šumová, visitors found both our T-shirt collections, the OKOLO Next Step magazine, and our debut collection of products entitled The Things, made in collaboration with Antonín Hepnar, Tomáš Král, Camille Blin, Jan Činčera, Martin Prokeš, and Martin Žampach. There were also a series of theoretically focused graphic prints or the unique one-off project by dutch Daphna Isaacs, Laurens Manders. All these items were accompanied by other products, some of which were also for sale. Their only link to each other is the world around us and our passion for beautiful and intelligent products.

Photos by Jaroslav Moravec

Our exhibition Retrospective of the Light received 9th October one of the Editor in Chiefs prizes in special category for the Extraordinary Enterprise at Designblok 2010. Thank You for it.

Here are the official pictures and text about the lightning design of Antonín Hepnar.

Design of lights in all versions – table, floor, wall, and suspension – has always represented the creative mainstay of Antonín Hepnar’s work. This fan of wood and clearly turned shapes has been active in the field of applied arts since the second half of the 1950.

Antonín Hepnar is one of the designers who have never had to rely on the poor possibilities of domestic industrial production under the previous regime. On the contrary, his creative motto, based primarily on handicraft and an essential workshop background, enabled him to experiment and create unique interior products of unparalleled visual and manufacturing quality during that time. The designer decided right at the start of his career to focus on lights, apart from candlesticks, bowls, and sculptures. Thus, the lamps he made in limited small-lot productions, sold exclusively in the Dílo showroom, currently rank among the exceptional artifacts that document the field of handmade original design under totalitarianism.


All the exhibited lighting objects work with the basic archetypal shapes and thus become surprisingly atemporal. The turned rotational shapes urged the designer to apply them to the design of lights. The combination with metal, glass, and other materials gave birth to a compact set of illuminants that demonstrate the designer’s development during his intensive work, spanning thirty years. His first designs made during his studies indicate the impact of the post-war decorative and organic style, which is, nevertheless, transformed into personal and precise handiwork. For Hepnar’s lights, the 1970s meant a time of pure simple elementary shapes that are sometimes more or less influenced by a decorative aspect that the designer discovered while furnishing or restoring interiors. The symbol of a circle becomes one of Hepnar’s specific shapes, which he applies in his typically intimate wall lamps, thus creating extraordinary lighting effects thanks to the lathe-turned surface. In the 1980s, the designer carried out new experiments mainly with halogen lights. The exhibition symbolically finishes with a terse table lamp in the form of a rocket, which won the Good Design Award in 1991. Its essential form is a timeless evidence of how the entire work of this significant Czech designer and artist is still relevant.

photos by Jaroslav Moravec

How will look our everyday life activities in the near future? One possibility give us the last project of London based designer Oscar Diaz, who is also one of the our collaborators for the second issue of OKOLO magazine. Diaz was commissioned for the exhibition New Simplicity prepared by curator Nuno Coelho in London to design something using technology of 3D printing.

Diaz designed new system of creating the keys called While you sleep, where we can make key from data made in parametric software.

There is a text by Diaz:
‘While you sleep’ was commissioned for ‘New simplicity’ and exhibition about simple design curated by design critic Nuno Coelho. Nine designers were asked to investigate the possibilities of using 3D printing technology as a manufacturing tool in the near future.

We decided to question the traditional key cutting service, and propose a product/service scenario where the use of the 3D printing technology will facilitate the copy and storage of keys as data.

Since 3D data can be managed by parametric software and allow easy customization, the type of head can be chosen, and also the texture or color to differentiate the garage key, from the one for the front door house.

Post Office branches could provide the scanning service, and from the data your key would be made easily. You can then send it by e-mail to the key-printing machine, or store it online on a virtual safety box. If you ever lose you key, it will be ready for you to download and print. Making a key could be as easy as using a photo booth or a cash point.

The keys head shape has been redesigned so they can be clipped together without using a key ring. Accessories include a wristband and buttons where is possible to clip one or two keys.

A part from the pieces built with 3d printers, a variety of products which value simple solutions over visual complexity are also exhibited.