This is a shortened version of an article published in Matter vol 6.1, a publication of Material ConneXion.

Material ConneXion is the leading global platform for material innovations and solutions.

We meet at Skeppsholmen, a little island in the centre of Stockholm, where Jeppe Wikström runs the Max Ström publishing house together with Marika Stolpe. The island is full of culture, with Sweden’s museum of
modern art, Moderna Museet, as well as the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities and the Royal University College of Fine Arts.
 

Considering their influence, SDL and its sister company Thomas Eriksson Architects seem surprisingly unsung outside the world of design. TEA was founded in 1988 by Eriksson, and had within a few years already worked with Scandinavian giants like IKEA, SAS and Absolut. While leading TEA, Eriksson saw the need for a closer dialogue between architecture and design, and by 1998 Stockholm Design Lab had fully materialized, co-founded by Eriksson, Björn Kusoffsky (Art Director) and Göran Lagerström (Strategist)....

It started in a so-called brownstone on 53rd Street, a museum founded by three ladies who lunched. It was, as Glenn Lowry writes in an essay published to coincide with the museum’s reopening, separate from the street, pointedly removed, up a set of stairs. This was not a museum that was about ‘accessibility’. It was a museum that was about a particular subculture of the wealthy and connected, until 1939, when J. Alfred Barr, the museum’s first director, commissioned its first proper home, designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone.

When you come driving on the small road towards the village of Porquera de los Infantes, 100 km north of Palencia in northern Spain, the first thing that strikes you is that this is just another of those Spanish villages that once had a life and then fell into oblivion. Most of the houses have collapsed and only a few people have chosen to stay.
Coming closer, you start to realize why bus-loads of visitors have come to the almost abandoned village lately and why the leading Spanish newspaper El País has written about it.

An interview with photographer Dawid (Björn Dawidsson), by Anette Sallmander

Photo© Björn Dawidsson

Born in 1949, and known only as Dawid, he is
one of the first photographers to stage exhibitions with only photographs at the popular art venue in Stockholm, Liljevalchs, in 1971.

Chatting over coffee one day, I discovered Claudia's background and decided to feature her here on Faces of Design. Claudia's background involves an unusual job profile in combination with a lot of aspects that we value highly here at Faces of Design: she's got an international, interdisciplinary mindset, as well as great curiosity and drive.

We meet in Copenhagen at the SAS Royal hotel, designed by Arne Jacobsen, at 8.45 on a cloudy May morning. We greet each other among a host of multicoloured ‘Egg’ chairs. He is wearing a light blue shirt with buttoned-up collar, a dark pair of chinos and leather loafers. He is 183 cm tall, weighs 95 kilos, and carries his 58 years well. He speaks softly, keeping his eyes engaged with mine, sometimes leaning towards me to press a point. His cautious smile starts from the left of his mouth, bounces to his brown eyes and resurfaces at his mouth.

A flamboyant career created with passion and dedication fused with natural talent. Tall and long-limbed, his sculptural body reflecting a devotion to sports, two deep dark eyes looking down from almost two metres, Arik Levy took a shortcut to the world of international design to be recognized as an inventive and polyhedric creator. Designer, technician, artist, photographer and filmmaker, Levy’s skills are multi-disciplinary and his work – fuelled by a poetical and never-ending zeal for research and innovation combined with an unpredictable and surprising world of visions – can be found on display in renowned shop-windows as well as prestigious galleries and museums worldwide.

Thomas Sandell relates Danish architect Bjarge Ingels’s explanation for this tendency to spontaneously say ‘yes’ when invited to take on a new assignment. Simple: – “Yes is more!”So, even when he is approached by people for suggestions about their kitchens, he says yes, which sometimes irritates those who feel that he should concentrate on bigger issues. – For me it is a pleasure I can seldom resist. Meeting people is often good, especially when they are open to a dialogue.