Recently, in Denmark, artist Jens Haaning took the relationship between art and social commentary to the next level by submitting two empty canvases to a Danish museum. Originally paid approximately $84,000 to create new works of modern art, Haaning instead submitted the two blank canvases titled “Take the Money and Run,” insisting that they are a commentary on poor wages.

However, The Kunsten Museum of Modern Art begs to differ, arguing that Haaning didn’t fulfill his contract to deliver the art and return the money, though they have since displayed the pieces as part of their exhibition dubbed “Work It Out,” itself a larger exploration of people and their relationship with work.

The ensuing controversy has sparked debates over Haaning’s methods. Did he, in fact, create anything? Is the statement itself the art? Or did he simply, as his canvases suggest, take the money and run?

The commission from the Kunsten Museum was part of an agreement with Haaning, and the money (more than half a million kroner) was intended to be framed as a reprise on one of the artist’s earlier works, “En Gennemsnitlig Dansk Årsindkomst.” Translated as “An Average Danish Annual Income, 2010” that piece consisted of around 280 banknotes, approximately $53,000 USD. The work was displayed alongside a second piece illustrating the annual income in Austria, and was itself controversial at the time, as viewers and critics alike were both enthralled and somewhat mystified by the seemingly ambiguous nature of the pair. Was the material representation of annual income meant as a commentary on wage gaps in Denmark (and the European Union at large)? Or was it simply a way to shock viewers through a garish display of money in its physical form?

Either way, the pieces did spark interest and debate. This, paired with Haaning’s reputation for dynamic modern art that raises larger societal, cultural, and political questions, was enough for the Kunsten to provide him the dough with the goal of creating a reprisal of his earlier work for their “Work It Out” exhibition.

Though there were mixed reactions to the blank canvasses, those at Kunsten do admit that Haaning’s work was provocative. “It wasn’t what we had agreed on in the contract, but we got new and interesting art,” Kunsten CEO Lasse Andersson admitted in a recent exchange with NPR.

For his part, Haaning was transparent in his messaging. Unlike his previous money-laden pieces, “Take the Money and Run” did not lack ambiguity. “The work is that I have taken their money,” he states. Through the blank canvasses, he wanted to comment on his own work situation as an artist, and on the “miserable working conditions” whereby he alleges he would have actually had to pay money out of this own pocket to recreate his own work for the Kunsten. Though the museum disagrees, the piece has certainly stirred controversy within the art community, both in Denmark and throughout the world, reinforcing the power of art as a successful and effective way to shape perceptions and opinions. Even if it is just a blank canvas.

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You’re probably already familiar with two of Japan and Denmark’s most widely recognized design styles: wabi-sabi and hygge. It’s easy to see the overlap between the two, especially when it comes to natural materials, coziness, and a general lack of clutter. Eschewing ornate embellishment in favor of sculptural simplicity of form, Japandi style takes elements of both to achieve an extraordinarily harmonic result.

Minimalism and Simplicity

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Sleek, uncomplicated silhouettes cut down visual clutter for a more relaxing vibe. That doesn’t mean you can’t have drama in the form of large sculptural pieces, but look for objects with shapes and surfaces that aren’t broken up too much by unnecessary frills and ornamentation. Each object should serve a clear purpose, even if that purpose is just to provide visual balance in the space or bring in a certain color. Try to think like an art director: how does this item interact with those around it? What message does it send? Does it enhance the feeling you’re trying to create, or is the space more powerful without it?

Emphasis on the Organic

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Natural materials echo the natural world, encouraging a sense of harmonious flow as you move indoors. Both Japanese and Scandinavian design styles elevate the beauty of wood in its own right, highlighting the color, texture, and grain to become a focal point in the room. Wool, rattan, seagrass, jute, linen, stone, leather, and cork are among the other organic materials you could incorporate, along with living plants, to enhance that connection to nature.

Warmth and Comfort

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Close your eyes and conjure up the most relaxing space imaginable. No, really. It’ll tell you a lot about the sights, smells, sounds, and textures that comfort you and make you feel safe. Bring in cozy textiles, seating you can snuggle into, warm mood lighting, and even scented candles or the perfect platter for your favorite treats to keep on the dining room table. Whatever helps you achieve “hygge,” the pleasures of everyday well-being, while maintaining an overall sense of cleanliness and balance.

Perfectly Balanced Colors

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Scandinavian style typically embraces softer, more neutral colors like white, beige, gray, and black, while Japanese palettes might carefully bring in richer, more saturated hues like jewel tones. Combine the two by creating a neutral backdrop enlivened by rust, moss, peach, or any other accent color that expresses your personality without overwhelming the space.

A Sense of Timelessness

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Even more important to the Japandi style than aesthetic is a feeling of heft and durability, and the sense that an object will have a long life. In both Japanese and Scandinavian design, quality is immediately evident in the form of fine craftsmanship, attention to detail, and sustainable materials. You can see it in how evenly a basket is woven, or in the visible joints of a wooden table. Look for handcrafted items as well as well-built antiques that seem like they’ll stand the test of time even with regular handling, their weathering contributing to their beauty in the spirit of wabi-sabi.

It might sound like a contradiction, considering the fact that Japandi is often spun as a trend, but avoid trendy mass-produced items, even if they fit within the general design style; the idea is that each piece you choose will feel classic and timeless decades into the future.

Top image: Jenna Peffley via Architectural Digest

The post Japandi Style: 5 Ways to Achieve Cozy Minimalist Perfection in Your Home first appeared on Dornob.

Does furniture have to be comfortable, or even functional, to be worth creating? Most people would say yes, but perhaps the answer depends upon your perspective on the line between art and design. Good art aims to provoke an emotional response, or at least an intellectual inquiry, and design is supposed to be useful. But sometimes that line is blurred.

Copenhagen-based artists Lea Hein and Magnus Pettersen, working together as Pettersen & Hein, love to play with that liminal space. Their collections of strange furniture are unquestionably beautiful, and from some angles, you might see them as functional objects. From others, they look like gallery pieces that should never, under any circumstances, actually be sat upon or used.

The pair asks: “What happens when design is no longer comprised by function but longs for the aesthetic and ethical freedom of art? American artist Richard Artschwager once said, ‘If you sit on it, it’s a chair. If you walk around it and look at it, it’s a sculpture’.”

“Some objects [accommodate] different ways of living and using a space by paying homage to materials, color, and form rather than functional use, thereby taking on a clear unique, bold position, the end-result often being intriguing and extraordinary. When boundaries between design and art are effaced, [the] potential for magic occurs.”

It’s not hard to see that magic in their work. Hein is a furniture designer, and Pettersen is an artist specializing in concrete sculptures. The objects they create are recognizable as lamps, tables, vases, and chaise lounges, but there’s something charmingly unique about each one.

Some, for instance, have faces. Some look like they might serve some sort of arcane purpose known only to a select few. Some are just more fun than average, like a full-length mirror that flows down onto the floor. But they also take mundane items a few steps further than they have to, expanding upon them and embellishing them in a fresh and creative way.

Many of Pettersen and Hein’s boldest designs are from their 2017 collection “Home,” including a set of anthropomorphic tables and wavy mirrors. They said they wanted that furniture to feel psychedelic and alive, representing “who you are both physically and mentally.”

Ultimately, what you get feels like more than you bargained for, but in a good way. Each individual piece is both an eye-catcher and a conversation starter, grand enough to put on a pedestal and illuminate as the focal point of a room.

Pettersen and Hein are arguably at the forefront of a new wave of Danish modern design — one that feels rooted firmly in the 21st century. The recognizable style of their collaborative work is instantly iconic.

“To place yourself outside a category creates new potential,” says Hein in an interview with Disegno. “When working in the space between art and design, you are free from restrictions, [and] there are no rules. Having fewer limitations allows you to work experimentally. It is really exciting to take things from one context and put them in another because you see things in new ways. I think it is about refining and transforming something boring and industrial into something that is more poetic.”

The post Design Duo Specializes in Making the Weirdest Possible Furniture first appeared on Dornob.

Modern sea baths build on these early ideas either by creating “sea pools” on beaches or building floating platforms, which themselves might offer diving boards, stadium seating, saunas, bathrooms, changing rooms, boat launches, and other amenities. A new example of the latter has popped up on the island of Bornholm in Denmark, and it looks like a gorgeous way to spend a sunny afternoon.

The Hasle Harbour Bath by White Architects is a sculptural space that’s bringing a little vitality back to a town hit hard by the decline of its fishing industry. Once a hub for shipping, fishing, and ferry service, the local port has grown quiet in recent years. But the things that are truly unique about Hasle Harbour are its numerous breakwaters, which protect it from the surge of the Baltic Sea but also make it feel distant and disconnected from life on land. The architects wanted to revitalize the area and make use of its isolated waters by creating a fun public area with views of the horizon.

Made of two timber stair formations protruding from a floating concrete platform, the Harbour Bath design takes inspiration from “flying carpets” to create a viewing platform and outdoor lounge, offering swimming pools of various depths along its inner edge and diving boards for swimmers who want to interact with the open water.

“The intention was for people to walk, sit, and lie on the new structure, which gave rise to the design concept of outdoor ‘carpeting’ that folded over the breakwaters,” White Architects explain. “The largest of these, the ‘flygande mattan’ or ‘flying carpet,’ forms the main structure. Welcoming all ages and abilities, the open design allows visitors to intuitively interact with the structure.”

“The unusual name refers to the tip of the Z-shaped structure, [which] shoots seven meters above the water’s surface, evoking the dynamism of the mythological carpet. At this westerly point, visitors are rewarded with views of the Hasle harbour, the sea, and the formidable sunsets.”

Hasle Harbour Bath adds to a collection of similar destinations throughout Denmark and elsewhere in Europe and the U.K. In addition to the old Ribersborgs Kallbadhus in Sweden, established in 1898, and Copenhagen’s Kastrup Søbad, built in 2004, bathers can also enjoy The Harbor Bath by world-renowned Danish architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) in Aarhus.

If the Hasle Harbour Bath’s piqued your interest, you’ll definitely want to check out a few more unusual swimming spots, including the Kastrup sea bath and Berlin’s Badeschiff.

The post Harbour Bath: Swimming Pool Platform Set Into the Danish Seas first appeared on Dornob.

One way to encourage consumers to buy your EV is to design a beautiful, practical car. Biomega, a Danish company that normally produces electric bicycles and cargo bikes, unveiled just such a vehicle last month in the form of SIN. Named after Singapore (the city that inspired its concept), SIN is an affordable, lightweight EV for urban mobility. It seats four passengers, can go from 0 to 62 miles per hour in under 13 seconds, and has a maximum speed of 80 miles per hour. Its frame is made of carbon fiber, and its 14kWh battery is hidden in the floor. Unfortunately, European consumers will have to wait until sometime between 2021 and 2023 to shell out €20,000 for a SIN of their own.

So what prompted a company that normally makes electric bicycles to design an electric car? Simply put, Biomega believes in making attractive bicycles and is now approaching the SIN car with the same goal of encouraging a paradigm shift in transportation away from fossil fuel dependence. To achieve this, they put together a world-class team of creatives to make their products look as irresistible as possible.

The original colors of Biomega’s bicycle collection were selected by Beatrice Santiccioli, a color expert with over two decades of personal experience. Santiccioli has also created colors for the Nike eyewear featured in the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, Benetton watches, and numerous Apple products. Jens Martin Skibsted, the co-founder of Biomega, heads one of Denmark’s top product design firms alongside architect Bjarke Ingels and industrial designer Lars Larsen, all of whom have brought at least some level of knowledge and expertise to Biomega. The all-star team doesn’t end there, either. The company has also been blessed by the involvement of Marc Newson, the Creative Director of Qantas Airways, and Ross Lovegrove, an internationally acclaimed designer whose work has been exhibited as some of the world’s most prestigious museums.

The company website concisely states that the design philosophy for their bicycles is either “mega” or “meta” tech, explaining: “Mega-tech is when the fascination of a certain technology becomes the driving force of the bike design, and innovation arises from a clash between form and function and this technology; meta-tech is where technology becomes instrumental to the bike design and subsequently can cause paradigms to break in [its] application…”

Similar to their bicycles, Biomega’s SIN car represents true Danish minimalism, unlike the soulless style that so commonly passes for Danish design these days. The company calls this phenomenon out on its website for becoming “its own pastiche,” preferring to endow their own products with a more exuberant “organic minimalism.” When all is said and done, getting back to the beauty of Danish design is what Biomega expects will most encourage people to accept alternative forms of mobility.

The post The Beauty of Biomega’s Affordable, Lightweight Electric Vehicle first appeared on Dornob.

Eco Townhouse

Aptly called “Eco Townhouse,” the multi-level structure in Brompton, near London, was furnished by Skagerak and Montana, both of whom are considered world leaders in eco-friendly brand furnishings. The venture makes up a key component of the Brompton Design District, which collectively chose “Material Consequences” as its theme for 2018.
In keeping with that theme, the townhouse only features brands that have demonstrated an outstanding level of dedication to sustainability, social accountability, and the use of responsibly-sourced materials.

Montana provided the indoor furniture for the project, while Skagerak supplied all the components for the garden. Every piece of furniture in the Eco Townhouse is made from locally-sourced wood that was reforested immediately upon being torn down, and they’re all lightweight, too, so they can easily be moved around to create fresh configurations. A few other notable pieces on site include the Overlap table and bench by Taf (a Swedish architecture studio), the archetypal Lise Sunchair that Isbrand designed 25 years ago, and Louise Hederstrëm’s Reform table and bench.
Skandium, a London-based Scandinavian design brand that was also prominently featured in the project, stated: “Scandinavian suppliers stand head and shoulders above the rest of the world when it comes to mitigating the environmental and even social impact of their products, and as such, Skandium is already populated with superlative examples of sustainable, responsible design.”

Philosophically Speaking

Montana and Skagerak feel that the term “sustainability” has been overused and reduced to little more than a cliché buzzword. Instead, they’ve embraced the concept of “consequences” to stress the fact that quality eco-friendly products also need to be able to withstand generations worth of time, both physically and spiritually.
Skagerak CEO Jesper Panduro explains: “Our principles as a company are based on simple lessons my mother taught me. Always be a decent person, always take responsibility, always be respectful. It’s not the most profitable way of thinking, but it is the only way to think if you are a business.”

Annette Spanggaard from Montana adds: “We create modular systems so that people can make room for personality in their homes. The Montana system has 36 modules, four depths, and 42 colors — so you can imagine the different combinations.”

Townhouse Highlights

Everything in the Eco Townhouse is unique and offers at least a little flexibility to always keep the design feeling fresh. For instance, the Reykjavik Daybed by Included Middle design can easily be flipped over to alter the balance of color. The shelving is similarly adaptable, boasting a variety of assorted sizes and colors. Other notable pieces of interest include the CH88 Chair, a Hans J Wegner design made from Danish forest hardwood, and the Noguchi Coffee Table, Anton Björsing’s design for Vitra.

The post Scandinavian Townhouse Makes Eco-Friendly Design Choices Easy first appeared on Dornob.

Morten Birch and Nichlas Lloyd met at a business school in Denmark about 10 years ago. After a lot of brainstorming, they came up with the feature-packed STRØM CITY bike. The duo understands the challenges of urban commuting, and they say they want to make it easier for everyone.

“Our mission with STRØM Bikes is to make inner-city commuting more sustainable and convenient, and to help accelerate the transition to green transportation,” they explain.

Hidden just inside the STRØM CITY bike’s frame is a sleek removable battery, which gives you a cruising range of up to 50 miles on a full charge. Oh, and it comes with a built-in lock system to thwart would-be thieves. You won’t hear the bike’s 350-watt durable electric motor, but you’ll definitely feel it kick in. Simply use the “automatic drive” or “throttle” settings to go all-electric, or use the “pedal assist” setting for a simple speed boost.

STRØM CITY has also been fitted with a seven-speed Shimano gear system for those times when you actually want to ride your bike. After all, that’s the way to go if you want to get some exercise or your battery is out of juice.

The bike’s aluminum frame helps keep it light, weighing in at just 37 pounds without the battery and 43 pounds with it. There are two frame sizes to choose from — medium (160-180 centimeters, or 63-71 inches) and large (180-210 cm/70-83 inches) — so people of all sizes are guaranted a fit. On top of all that, you can also order the bike in matte black, moon gray, or shiny white.

STRØM CITY keeps safety front and center. It’s equipped with dual Tektro disc brakes for safe stopping, and there’s no chance of ever forgetting your bike lights, since there’s an integrated lighting system built right into it. Just push a button to turn on the front and rear lights.

STRØM CITY is also stacked when it comes to luxury bells and whistles. An LED display lets you move between the bike’s six different assist levels and keep track of the battery level. Need to power up an electronic device? No worries: The bike also features a fully integrated USB charging system so you can top up on the road.

If the regular display isn’t enough for you, you always have the option to upgrade to STRØM’s “intelligent computer display,” which lets you see your battery level, assist level, distance, trip meter, speed in either km/h or mph, and much more.

We’re personally excited about STRØM CITY’s puncture-free tires. Just think: no more sudden stops and on-the-fly patching when you run over a nail or a shard of glass. Magical.

The STRØM design team put a lot of thought into durability and only made use of rust-free parts when crafting their e-Bike. They say: “We’ve even added a chain protector to keep mud and dirt out of your chain. Less cleaning, more biking!”

The post STRØM CITY: The Ultimate e-Bike From the Bicycle Capital of the World first appeared on Dornob.